The Installation Process

As most readers of this document know, about 400 Athena workstations are maintained by a staff of 5. For this reason, the traditional Unix installation process is far too cumbersome. Not only do new workstations need to be installed en masse during a short period during the summer, but hacked or non-functional workstations need reinstallation. DCNS-cluster does roughly 140 reinstalls per semester.

A reinstall usually involves inserting the install media, typing a small number of configuration variables (e.g. IP address), waiting for the install media to pop out, and then letting the installation process continue over the network.

To keep this job manageable, the following times must be kept small:

1. Time until done typing. The native install procedure for most versions of Unix involves a lot of typing, and there's no way to parallelize this task without hiring more people. For current platforms, staff spend less than two minutes on this stage of a reinstall.
2. Time until the install media pops out. The sooner the install media pops out, the sooner the installation of another workstation can begin. For current platforms, this takes anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes. DEC 3100's, DEC 5000's and SGI's do not require install media; they do the entire installation off the net.
3. Time until the installation process finishes. If everything goes well, it's acceptable for this stage to go on for hours. However, when something goes wrong, it is necessary for a staff member to sit in front of the workstation and watch the install process happen to find out what's breaking. Current platforms take about 45 minutes to finish installing themselves.

Until these requirements change, any new public workstation platform will need an install procedure. This has always been one of the most difficult parts of Athena ports.

For more details on Athena installation, see the file /mit/opdoc/install/software.install.overview on Athena.