Overview

As an experiment with Agile Methods, we managed the tasks of the Athena 10 Preview
deliverable as a sprint.

The sprint is over. Athena 10 Preview is live.

This method may be useful, but its value was lessened by being a redundant management point.
The actual project was being managed in the Athena 10 Technical Plan wiki page. The gem to harvest moving forward is to create a simple list of deliverables/features, track their priority and done/not-done status.

Deliverables

• A set of Debian packages and an installer that provides an end user with the ability to install the following features on a pre-installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) System.
• A web page at athena10.mit.edu that tells people what Athena10 is, what prerequisites are to install it, and how to acquire and install it.

Feature List

Required Functionality for Athena Preview Milestone

Applications

• DONE Users can easily read MIT mail using Evolution or Pine.
• DONE 6/9/08 Users can print to Athena network printers with the lpr command and from applications which support printing.
• DONE 7/25/08 Users can run emacs with Athena site customizations.
• Subset: Athena machines have attach-and-run scripts in the default path for various bits of locker software such as the Moira tools.

Legacy

Legacy but de-supported features not supported in Preview.

Changes for Serial Reusability

Not supported in Preview.

Changes For Shared Network Home Directories

Not supported in Preview.

Monitoring

Monitoring as implemented in Athena Clusters is out of scope. We will be able to count the installs from the apt repository to measure uptake of Preview.

Self-maintenance

• DONE 6/30/08 Athena machines have filesystem-level access to AFS.
• DONE 6/30/08 The default GNOME panel setup contains a menu of important Athena locker software (currently unmaintained). For performance reasons, the files representing this menu must be stored on local disk.
• DONE 7/25/08 Athena machines almost always have the correct time as determined by time.mit.edu.
• DONE 7/16/08 Users can submit bug reports to the appropriate channel using the sendbug command.

Miscellaneous

• DONE 6/18/08 /usr/sbin/sendmail is configured to inject mail through outgoing.mit.edu and to use Kerberos authentication if the user has valid tickets. The sendmail queue is flushed once an hour in case mail has to be queued locally.
• DONE 6/16/08 Athena login sessions follow a complicated set of rules regarding user dotfiles.
• DONE 7/29/08 Rebrand gdm for Athena10 without rebranding it for SIPB Debathena