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From: wdc@MIT.EDU
Subject: Notes: Linux/Athena Support Discussion 16 March 2009
Date: March 16, 2009 11:33:46 AM EDT
To: linux-ponder@mit.edu

Next meeting is scheduled for Friday 27 March 3:00 to 4:30 in N42-286.
(This resolves a conflict were I will be out of town, and where TechTime
says everyone is available.)

The agenda will be:

Review Bill's draft/inventory of service offerings.

Agenda:

Combine Key components with Use Cases -- Define what is necessary to
support the use cases.

----

Present: wdc, othomas, gettes, alexp, aurora

Action:

We reviewed the Classes of Service and Use Cases from the 2 February
Meeting.

gettes proposed that "By mid- to late April that we understand what
services we are going to be offering or not offering."

othomas suggests that someone draft such a list rather than trying to
craft that list through a series of meetings.

We should coalesce our minutes, proposals and findings in a wiki space.

After having reviewed the ways servers are used, we concluded that we
don't provide service offerings related to the creation of servers.
Instead we provide support offerings that tell customers how to USE
services on servers.

We do offer support offerings to tell desktop users how to enable
certain services on their desktop systems, but we don't conceive the
offering as "server related".

(Wordsmith this offline later.)

Brainstorming the list of services:

Perhaps the better question is, What has to be put into the class of
service definitions (the components present) in order to deliver on the
use cases?"

For the Athena Cluster "IS&T Owned and Managed" class of service,
we provide hardware with OS and application and service integration.


For both individually and DLC owned systems, we provide the ability to
install an integrated set of applications and services on top of
particular OSs and hardware.

For each component Service offerings would be (independent of who
provides):
	The software itself that implements a key component.
	Instructions on use of the component.
	Answering of questions about using the component.
	Instructions on installing the component.
	Answering questions about installing the component.

The interesting question is, "Who provides the service offering,
depending on the Component, Platform, and class of customer?"

Options are None, Upstream, in-house.

Simplifying approach to enumerating what might be needed:
Our OS on our harware vs. foreign OS on foreign hardware.

Action Item:  Bill puts up Wiki pages with our current understandings
and a draft of what our service offerings might be.

-Bill