Meeting of 2/15/00
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Present were: kretch, ghudson,  miki, ted, rbasch, wdc, orbitee

Summary:

1.  We discussed the list of features and drawbacks of the current
Athena Private Workstation model. That list, and a summary of what users
said at the last meeting, is going to be available on
web.mit.edu/athena-pws/www

  Our unanimous conclusion was that the number one drawback of the
present model and implementation is that the changes, made by the owners
of the private workstations, may be lost. 

 People around the table agreed that the second most important drawback
is the lack of good communication between Athena and the users/owners of
the Athena Private Workstations. It was felt that we should do more in
the way of outreach and documentation.

 2. We discussed whether there was the necessity for a redesign of the
Athena Private Workstation model. 

  After some discussion, we recognized that the Athena install/update
redesign for the next release may correct the most important problem,
the loss of changes at update. In view of this, we decided to recommend
against a new model at this time. It was felt that we should examine the
new Athena install/update once deployed,  and if necessary to recommend
additional work.

3. The team decided on the following recommendations :

   * No new model for the time being.  

    * Endorse the work in progress by the Athena release team to redo
the Solaris Athena release to use the Sun pkgadd utility for operating
system installs, and to amend the update procedure to save old versions
of configuration files, and leave unfamiliar Solaris packages in place
on Private Workstations.

   * Revisit the question of whether that work was sufficient in 6-12
months after the Athena release 8.4 goes to the field.

   * better outreach :

          better publicity of the existence of the Private Athena Workstation

          better documentation of
	how the Athena install and update work.
	how to perform Athena-unique administration tasks.
	what to expect is the same and different between Athena and non-Athena.

          training in administering an Athena Private Workstation.

          creation of an Athena Private Workstation Users Group.

  * consider follow-on projects of small scope:
	changing the way services are added to an Athena Private Workstation.
	making Athena and third party software install with vendor-supplied
install utilities.
	providing users with more flexibility at the install/update time.

  
4. The team will review and discuss its conclusions with a number of key
players :
    W91, Departments that have Unix clusters that are not Athena (e.g
the Math Department), Vijay, Jeff Schiller, and the Integration Team.


5. Next meeting will be on March 7th. 
    

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