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The Athena 10 release is planned for summer-2008 IAP 2009, with full roll-out over the Summer of 2009. It is intended to renew the Athena software, improve security, bring the base operating system into closer alignment with the MIT community, and reduce the ongoing maintenance burden of the Athena environment.
The Athena 10 project will be a collaboration with the Debathena developers from SIPB and will also act as a follow-on to the current Debathena release. From IS&T, the primary developers will be Greg Hudson (the release engineer and lead developer), Robert Basch, and Andrew Boardman, with Alex Prengel taking on the role of ensuring compatibility with third-party software lockers. From the SIPB, the contributors will be Tim Abbott and Anders Kaseorg.
(Greg Hudson left the project on October 1, 2008. William Cattey took on more project management responsibility at that time. Additional SIPB contributors: Geoffrey Thomas, Greg Price and Evan Broder.)
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Goals
- Continue to support the familiar user interface.
- Continue to support "Public Cluster" systems that clean themselves up after each user logs out.
- Continue to support the existing "Quickstation" systems tailored for shorter duration sessions.
- Allow installation of Athena on an already-installed Linux system without an Operating System re-install.
- Un-bundle the components to allow customers the option to pick and choose which pieces of Athena they want.
- Retire functionality that is no longer used, or is no longer of sufficient benefit to warrant the ongoing maintenance cost.
- Replace more of MIT invented or maintained components with upstream open source components, where necessary migrating to community standard practices rather than Athena-unique practices.
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- DONE Users can connect to the mainframe with the x3270 terminal emulator.
- DONE Users can send and receive Zephyr messages.
- DONE Users can browse the web with Firefox, which is preconfigured with the MIT CA, a local filesystem path for its disk cache, and the Java and Flash plugins.
- DONE Users can easily connect to the MIT Chat service with Gaim, and in addition can use the gaim-encryption plugin for end-to-end message encryption.
- DONE Users can easily read MIT mail using Evolution or Pine.
- DONE Users can read archives in Discuss.
- DONE Users have access to a rich C development environment as well as basic installations of Perl, Python, and Java.
- DONE Users have access to a variety of non-standard utilities (jot, lam, saferm, etc.).
- DONE Users can print to Athena network printers with the lpr command and from applications which support printing.
- DONE Users have access to the enscript command to format text documents into postscript for printing.
- DONE Users can run emacs with Athena site customizations.
- DONE Users can conduct single sign-on logins to other Athena machines (provided they have a keytab and are configured for remote access) or compatible non-Athena machines via kerberized ssh, telnet, rlogin, or ftp.
- DONE Users can query and manipulate IMAP mail stores with the mailquota, mailusage, from, and mitmail* commands.
- DONE Users can access and run software from AFS lockers through /mit paths via "attach", "add", "setup", and related commands. Home directories are also treated as lockers.
- DESUPPORT Users can use a network-enabled replacement for "write" between machines.
- DONE Users can query Athena hesiod information with the hesinfo command.
- DONE Users can spell-check documents using the ispell command.
- DONE Users can pull down MIT mail with the emacs movemail command (currently uses kpop).
- DONE Athena machines have a selection of international fonts installed.
- DONE Users can talk to serial devices using kermit.
- DONE Users can process TeX and LaTeX documents.
- DONE Athena machines can access Windows file shares using a Kerberos-enabled smbclient.
- DESUPPORT Athena machines can serve file shares to SMB clients, using a Kerberos-enabled Samba server which is pre-configured for the win.mit.edu realm.
- DONE Athena machines have attach-and-run scripts in the default path for various bits of locker software such as the Moira tools.
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- DONE Any MIT user can log into cluster machines using their Kerberos passwords and their AFS home directories.
- DONE Root logins on cluster machines are not permitted, but users can su to root once they log in as themselves.
- DONE Users can change their Kerberos passwords with the passwd command.
- DONE Private machine admins can configure who can log into machines remotely and locally with the /etc/athena/access file. They can also tag accounts as "local" and not part of the Hesiod/AFS namespace.
- Athena machines tagged as quickstations display a timer and nagging warnings to log out after a set period of time.
- DESUPPORT Users can temporarily enable and disable remote access daemons on Athena machines with the access_on and access_off commands, if the machine is configured to allow this.
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- DESUPPORT GNOME Bonobo components from one login session will not be reused in another login session because they may not have access to the same tickets and tokens. There is similar isolation for gconfd-2 for the same reason.
- DONE Users can log in simultaneously from multiple machines without running afoul of GNOME software locks in the home directory.
- DESUPPORT If a user's home directory is unavailable upon login, a temporary homedir will be created on local disk and used instead.
- DESUPPORT Users can log in with "ignore customizations" or in terminal mode to repair severely broken dotfiles.
- DONE User processes generated by Athena software components do not stick around after the user logs out. On cluster machines, user processes are forcibly killed after the user logs out.
- DONE Athena machines have a screensaver which accepts a Kerberos password to unlock and which allows the user to be logged out after a set time.
- DONE GNOME won't display a dialog about changes in X keyboard settings from one login to another, since the same account is used on multiple machines.
- DOCUMENT Basic GNOME functions will work when the user's home directory is inaccessible (such as when the user's AFS tokens have expired) or is over quota.
- DONE GNOME's trash handling has fixes for Athena home directories.
- DONE Users receive warning dialogs when Kerberos tickets are about to expire.
- DONE Users receive warning dialogs at login time when their homedir or mail quotas are approaching full.
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