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This plan has NOT YET been reviewed or approved for action.

Overview

For some time the Desktop Athena SPARC/Solaris configuration from Sun Microsystemshas been under review. It has reached the point where the costs of maintaining a second Athena desktop configuration are no longer justified by the incremental value of having Solaris as a second Athena desktop.

Over the summer of 2008 the Athena General Use Cluster number of Sun Solaris systems fell to 44. Through FY09 outreach will be made to customers to assist appropriately in dealing with the end of life of the Athena Desktop Solaris platform.

End of Life is targeted for July 1 2009.

Areas of exposure:

  1. Student use of Suns in Athena Clusters (small.)
  2. Faculty who don't want to give up their Suns.
  3. Classes teaching with Sun-Unique courseware.
  4. General use Solaris-only software:
  • ArcInfo: (geographic information system) – now available in the Win.MIT.edu clusters.
  • FrameMaker – This will no longer be available. Migrate documents to OpenOffice and Microsoft Office.
  • Acrobat distiller – This will no longer be available. Use word processor's built-in PDF output configuration.

Additionally, we need to account for the impact on servers built from Athena Solaris. We need to identify the count of Solaris servers in the field and determine if migration or continuing to do security updates is the best approach. Note that the cost of Solaris support still drops even if only the desktop applications and services are discontinued initially, and if OS security updates are continued for a little while.

Solaris EOL Customer Options:

  1. Switch to Linux Athena hardware.
  2. Migrate to work-alike software.
  3. Go it alone and work directly with Sun for support.

Plan of action:

  1. Create Desktop Athena Solaris EOL Details web site telling users the timeline, rationale and what to do.
  2. Meet with OEIT or ACCORD to announce this is coming and get them ready.
  3. Send out an announcement with summary rationale, July 1 date, and summary migration help, and a pointer to the web site.
  4. Establish MOTD messages to warn customers of Software/Hardware End of Life.
  5. Display signs on machines in clusters warning of Software/Hardware End of Life.
  6. Obtain list of faculty with Suns on their desks, and get Hotline to begin migrating them ASAP. Let them forward problem customers to appropriate folks internally: wdsouza, alexp, wdc, amb.
  7. Utilize mailing lists and beginning-of-term coordinated events to contact TAs and identify as many at-risk courses and course lockers as we can.
  8. Make a list of the courses with Solaris-only exposure, and identify what to do.
  9. Create a solaris-sunset email list with members: othomas, wdc, jdreed, jmhunt, gettes, bowser and an OEIT representative to receive calls for help.
  10. Quietly keep the 8 Solaris systems in 38-332 through the Fall term for classes that fall through the cracks.
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