You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.

Compare with Current View Page History

« Previous Version 5 Next »

Summary Status

Originally targeted roll-out of August 2008 will be delayed until January 2008.
Infrastructure milestone has been met.
Significant progress on the next milestone, Core.

See Also the Athena 10 Technical Plan: Milestones

Project Goals

  • Inventory Athena use cases.
  • Identify obsolete functionality and retire it.
  • Maintain or improve service levels for the non-obsolete functionality.
  • Migrate more functionality off of MIT-maintained code.
  • Redo MIT-maintained functionality to reduce its size and maintenance cost.
  • Adopt a base operating system in closer alignment with current practice in the MIT Linux community. (Ubuntu replaces Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL))
  • Adopt applications and services in closer alignment with current practice in the MIT Linux community. (Applications, Services, and Device drivers of Ubuntu are more modern than what is in RHEL.
  • Improve security.
  • Modularize functionality to allow installation on top of pre-installed OS.
  • New: Form a collaboration with the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) to leverage their modular DebAthena work, and to build a unified product going forward.

The Athena 10 Technical Plan contains the use case analysis of the Red Hat 4-based Athena version 9.4, the mapping of that functionality onto the Ubuntu base operating system, and the current status of the development work to produce the Athena 10 deliverables.

Deliverables

  • Software packages
    • Athena original software
    • Configurators for native or imported third party packages.
    • Self maintenace
  • Source repositories for software for which MIT is the upstream maintainer.
  • An automated update from Athena 9.4.
  • An installation system.
  • Release notes and documentation, particularly for aspects of Athena 9.4 which become desupported or supported in different ways.

These deliverables are further detailed in the Athena 10 Technical Plan: Deliverables

Roll-out Plan

To be refined.

Stakeholders

  • Athena Cluster Services Personnel who will install and maintain systems.
  • Athena Consultants who will field questions.
  • Academic Computing – will need service continuity, and input into long term direction.
  • Users of Athena General Use Clusters.
  • Users and maintainers of Private Athena Workstations.
  • Athena Server Operations.
  • MIT Training and Publications team, to assist with documentation.
  • Users of Third party Software, and Alex Prengel who maintains the third party software.

Lead Users

Mitigation of impact of delay from original August 2008 delivery.

With a best-efforts resourcing, an August 2008 roll-out proved unrealistic. That project plan also gave insufficient time for validation and refinement in collaboration with users. The revised timeline below addresses the following issues:

  • Incoming students will want something like Debathena. What can we give them?
  • Linux-based dialup will be in demand. How can this demand be met in advance of Athena 10?

Planned timeline

  • DONE July 2007 to January 2008: Pre-planning, and crafting of baseline functional specification.
    • Best efforts resourcing for project
    • Athena use case analysis.
    • Feature set determination.
    • Evaluate candidate baseline Linux distribution – possible successor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.
  • DONE January 2008 Initiate collaboration with Debathena SIPB project.
  • DONE January 2008 Shift from best-efforts to scheduled resourcing.
  • DONE February 2008 Create necessary development infrastructure.
  • January 2008 to 30 April 2008 Work to Core Milestone: The fundamental building blocks of the Athena environment are in place (AFS, login, incremental updates, etc).
  • January 2008 - 30 June 2008 Work to Basic Functionality Milestone: The high-profile Athena applications are in place (Firefox, email, etc.) Biggest scheduling issue: email clients.
  • January 2008 to: 15 August 2008 Work to Athena 10 Preview deliverable suitable for experimentation with by incoming freshmen.
  • 15 August 2008 to 1 October 2008 Work to Cluster Milestone: Self-maintenance features and GNOME modifications necessary for cluster machine deployments are in place. The updater is complete. Biggest scheduling issue: The updater.
  • 1 October 2008 - 1 November 2008 Work to Feature Complete Milestone: Remaining release features are completed except for rearchitected printing. The installer is complete. System release notes are complete. Backward compatibility issues are substantially resolved. Biggest scheduling issue: The installer.
  • 1 October 2008 - 1 November 2008 Beta testing.
  • 1 November 2008 - 1 December 2008 Work to Full Deployment Readiness Milestone: Early release is complete and Athena 10 is ready to be released to all cluster machines.
  • January 2009 - May 2009 Testing and refinement to make sure Athena 10 meets or exceeds expectations of Athena 9 users.
  • 1 July 2009 Full roll out to Athena Clusters.
  • 1 July 2009 - 15 October 2009 Follow-up, and confirmation that Athena 10 has successfully rolled out and replaces Athena 9.
  • No labels