[162] in Zephyr Mailing List
Zephyr 2.0 beta available
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Sat Jul 1 19:20:46 1995
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 95 19:18:05 -0400
To: zephyr@MIT.EDU
The beta release of Zephyr 2.0 is available at
athena-dist.mit.edu:pub/ATHENA/zephyr/zephyr-2.0-beta.tar.gz
This is not the version of Zephyr we are running at MIT
(zephyr.src.snap.950103.tar.gz corresponds most closely to what we are
currently running), and there may be new bugs, especially in the
server. Please report bugs or suggestions about the beta release to
zephyr-bugs@mit.edu and we will attempt to fix them before the actual
2.0 release.
Version 2.0 of Zephyr has the following incompatibilities with
previous versions:
* If you install the version 2.0 Zephyr server, clients from
releases of Zephyr prior to the 95/01/03 snapshot will be
able to subscribe, set locations, etc., but will not be able
to sent authentic notices to other users (notices will be
marked unauthentic), due to security changes in the
protocol. If this is a serious problem, it is easy to
disable the stricter authentication checking by changing
dispatch() in server/dispatch.c; ask me for details.
* The version 2.0 Zephyr server will not exchange brain dumps
with previous versions of the server. If you have more than
one server, you will have to upgrade all of your servers at
once (amd thus lose people's subscriptions).
Version 2.0 of Zephyr has the following notable changes:
* Zephyr now builds using autoconf, rather than imake, for
portability concerns. The portability of Zephyr should be
significantly improved, and care has been taken to make
Zephyr easy to build outside of the Athena environment. You
can easily build Zephyr with or without support for
Kerberos, Hesiod, and Xwindows.
* Up-to-date documentation has been added to the source tree
on building and installing Zephyr as well as on operating a
server and on using Zephyr clients.
* Patches from John Hawkinson (jhawk@mit.edu) have been
incorporated to make the Zephyr syslogd support the Solaris
streams logging driver.
* The speed and reliability of the server should be
significantly better.
* The retransmit delays for lost packets are now
2-2-4-4-8-8-16-16-32-32, instead of ten retries at 20
seconds each. Lost packets should now be significantly less
problematic for users. (However, note that zhm now takes
124 seconds to notice that a server has gone down, instead
of 40. The zhm in the actual 2.0 release will probably do
five retries at 2-2-4-4-8 seconds, while the server will
continue to use the old retransmit delays.)
* On the down side, the server no longer reports to host
managers when it it shut down cleanly, leading to delays for
users when servers are shut down. Our current plan for this
is to have the host manager in Zephyr version 2.1 use a
separate socket for sending messages to the server so that
it can receive errors when it gets ICMP port unreachable
messages.
We hope that the version 2.0 of Zephyr will be significantly more
useful to sites outside of MIT than previous versions.
