Athena 10 Preview Release

What is Athena 10? | Installing Athena 10 | Known Issues | FAQ | Changes from 9.4

What is Athena 10?

Athena 10 is a new milestone in the evolution of Athena, MIT's campus-wide computing environment. Athena 10 is based on the SIPB Debathena project, which brought Athena functionality to Debian and Ubuntu users.

Installing Athena 10

Who should install Athena 10?

For the Fall 2008 semester, Athena 10 should be considered beta-quality software. Debathena, upon which Athena 10 is based, has been in production for some time now and has a very large user base, however Athena 10 does contain some changes which require testing. We are making this preview release available to the community so that users can become familiar with Athena 10 before it becomes the default version.

As always, we recommend that you have a method in place for backing up any local data on your workstation.

System Requirements

Athena 10 is designed to supplement an existing Ubuntu installation. At this time, the only supported version of Ubuntu is Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron). If you wish to use another version of Ubuntu or Debian, you should install Debathena instead.

Obtaining Ubuntu

If you do not already have Ubuntu 8.04 installed, you can obtain it from the MIT Media Lab Ubuntu Mirror. You should download the "Desktop" edition for your platform (x86 or amd64)

Installation Process

Become root using "sudo -i" or one of the methods described here
At your shell prompt, type: wget http://athena10.mit.edu/install-athena10.sh
At your shell prompt, type: sh install-athena10.sh
Answer the installer's questions - it will ask you which flavor of Athena 10 you want to install, and whether you want to install the supplement cluster software package.

NOTE: After the installation process, please add yourself to the list testers@mit.edu. This list will allow you to stay up to date with bug reports and improvements to the Athena 10 Preview Release.
You can add yourself to the list in one of two ways:

athena% blanche -a joeuser testers replacing joeuser with your MIT username
Visit http://web.mit.edu/moira/ and select the "add or remove yourself from a list" button and enter "testers" as the list name. You will need MIT Personal Certificates for this.

Which Athena 10 do I want?

standard: The base package, provides Athena software, AFS, Kerberos, etc.
login: Allows remote users to login with their Athena passwords and homedirs. Mostly for dialup server use.
workstation: Provides a graphical login session

We expect the most popular flavors to be "standard" and "workstation". The primary difference between those two is whether or not you want to login with your Athena password and have your home directory be your AFS home directory. If you use your computer primarily as an Ubuntu workstation, but want access to Athena software "on demand", you should install "standard". If you want to work mostly in the Athena environment, you should install "workstation".

The following table may be useful in making your decision:

	standard	login	workstation
AFS, Kerberos	yes	yes	yes
attach/add	yes	yes	yes
Users can login with Athena password remotely	no	yes	yes
Users can login to graphical session with Athena password	no	no	yes

Known Issues

update_server does not yet exist, and thus Athena 10 machines cannot yet take DCMs.
The default PDF viewer has changed from Adobe Reader to Evince. Evince is Ubuntu's default PDF viewer, and should be sufficient for all PDF viewing and printing needs. Adobe Reader will still remain available via the "acroread" locker.
The "Failsafe" session does not function correctly.
-workstation machines will fail ungracefully if the user's AFS home directory is unavailable (due to a server outage, for example)

FAQ

What happened to LaTeX, OpenOffice, etc? They don't seem to be installed on my machine?

We are no longer building our own versions of software that was previously "in the release", such as LaTeX, OpenOffice, etc. Such software is already available from the Ubuntu "universe" repository. If you want to install all the software we provide on the cluster machines, you can install the debathena-cluster-software package. See the Private Workstation Owner's Guide for more information.

Why doesn't my machine automatically update like my Athena 9.4 machine did?

Athena 10 offers more flexibility than Athena 9.4, and we don't want to force an update model on users. As with all operating systems, you are encouraged to keep your operating system up to date. You can accomplish this in any number of ways. If you want the automatic updater, or any other functionality normally reserved for cluster machines, you can install those packages by hand. See the Private Workstation Owner's Guide for more inforamtion.

How do I make Athena 10 behave more like my Athena 9.4 private workstation?

You should install the debathena-workstation flavor of Athena 10. That will provide you with most of the functionality of a cluster machine, minus some specific packages like an automatic /tmp cleaner, an automatic updater, and security features designed for public workstations. The Private Workstation Owner's Guide contains a section on migrating from Athena 9.4 to Athena 10.

When I login with my Athena username and Kerberos password, my Athena dotfiles don't run and I don't get my AFS home directory by default.

This can occur if you already had a local user on your Ubuntu system with the same username as your Athena username. Here is how to fix this situation. In this example, it assumes that "joeuser" is your MIT username.

Login with your existing local account
Run sudo passwd to set the root password. This will first prompt you for your local password by saying "[sudo] password for joeuser:". You will then get a prompt that says "Enter new UNIX password:". You should select a password for the root user and type it there. You will be prompted to enter the new password again for confirmation.
Log out of your local account
Press Ctrl-Alt-F1, where you should get to a terminal based login prompt
Login as the user "root" with the password you previously set.
Run userdel joeuser to delete the local account (this will not delete your local files)
Run useradd joeuser admin to add your Athena username to the admin group.
Run chown joeuser /home/joeuser to be able to access any local files
Type "logout" to exit the root shell, and press Ctrl-Alt-F7 to return the login screen

I get an error window at login that begins with "User's .dmrc file is being ignored"

This is due to the UFS permissions on your AFS home directory. Run "chmod 755 $HOME" to solve this problem.

What AFS sysname should I use when deploying locker software?

i386_deb40. 64-bit machines will have the system amd64_deb40, which you can use if you have 64-bit versions of software. Athena 10 machines will also maintain a list of compatibility sysnames, so software built for Athena 9.4 and earlier will run if all the requisite libraries are available.

When will Athena 10 be officially released?

We expect Athena 10 to be released sometime during IAP 2009.

When will Athena 10 be deployed to the clusters?

We expect Athena 10 to be fully deployed to the clusters by the end of Summer 2009.

Changes from Athena 9.4

This section is divide into user-visible changes, and technical changes. The first group is of interest to all end users, the second is primarily of interest to system administrators or those wishing to know more technical details.

User-visible changes

write: The "write" command can no longer be used to contact users on other hosts. Please use Zephyr or Jabber for your instant messaging needs.
The Sawfish window manager: The Sawfish window manager was introduced with Athena 9.0 in 2001. With Athena 9.4 in 2005, Sawfish was replaced by the newer Metacity window manager. At the time, some users elected to continue using Sawfish via the presence of an ".athena-sawfish" in the user's HOME directory. Sawfish will no longer be a supported window manager in Athena 10
Mozilla: The monolithic Mozilla browser was the Athena supported web browser from 2003-2005. We no longer support Mozilla for web browsing, and all current users are encouraged to switch to Firefox, which has been the default Athena web browser since 2005. If you were using Mozilla as an e-mail client, you are encouraged to switch to the supported e-mail client, Evolution. If you prefer a client from the Mozilla project, Thunderbird is also available, although unsupported by IS&T.
access_on and access_off: If a machine was configured to allow it, users could run access_on to temporarily enable remote access to the machine, and access_off to disable it afterwards. This feature has been de-supported in Athena 10.
Temporary home directories: TODO: pending functionality
"Ignore Customizations" login option: TODO: pending functionality.
The Console window is no longer available: The Console window in most Athena 9.4 sessions is used to display messages to users. It will be de-supported in Athena 10, and any messages from the user's xsession will be written to ~/.xsession-errors.; Users will also not automatically receive notification of any new messages on the mail server. Please run from -t -n at the shell prompt to query the mail server for any new messages.
Certain filetypes are opened by "Athena" applications: Under Athena 9.4, certain file types are opened by locker software, such as applixware, gimp, realplayer, etc. This feature will be de-supported, and file types and preferred applications will be determined by the underlying operating system.

Technical Changes

Athena machines currently respond to requests on ports 13 and 37 (daytime, and time, respectively).: This feature will be de-supported The same information can be obtained via "athinfo date"
Setting PUBLIC in /etc/athena/rc.onf: /etc/athena/rc.conf is no longer supported in Athena 10. If you wish your workstation to have the same functionality as a cluster machine, you should install the debathena-cluster package
Controlling access with /etc/athena/access: /etc/athena/access will be de-supported Access control will be via the /etc/security/access.conf file, which has a substantially different format. See the Debathena page on access control for more information.
Locker replication de-supported: On Athena 9.4, OpenOffice and Acrobat Reader were copied out of their AFS lockers to the local machine. On Athena 10, OpenOffice will still be installed locally, as will a PDF reader (evince). There is no user-visible change, although the mechanism by which this is accomplished has changed.
/etc/athena/rc.conf de-supported: /etc/athena/rc.conf will no longer be supported.
IP, Hostname, and network device configuration via rc.conf: Athena 9.4 machines have /etc/athena/rc.conf as the canonical source for their IP address, hostname, and network device settings. This will be de-supported in Athena 10, and those settings will be configured as with any Ubuntu machine. Refer to the Ubuntu documentation on networking for more information.
machines run a local caching nameserver: This feature will be de-supported on most flavors of Debathena. Cluster workstations will run a local caching nameserver, and a package will be made available for other users wishing to run a local caching nameserver.
mkserv: mkserv will be de-supported in Athena 10.
Changes in time synchronization: Athena 10 machines will use the native time synchronization package against time.mit.edu, and will not force a sync after a DST change.
A krb4 srvtab can be used for kerberized services instead of a krb5 keytab: The srvtab will be de-supported and during an upgrade will be converted to a krb5 keytab if necessary.