Athena
8.3 Release (AC-08.3)
(Draft for Early Test, Effective 3 August 1999)
Overview
In July 1999, Information Systems released the latest version of the
Athena system (Release 8.3) on Sun and SGI workstations. These changes are
summarized in this document.
Summary of Changes
Among the most visible changes (effective with the Release) are the
following:
If your workstation is running the Athena 8.3 Release, the text string "8.3"
should appear within the output of the machtype -L command.
For example:
athena% machtype -L
8.3.1
The numbers following "8.3" may be different on your system; this
simply indicates a minor update within the 8.3 Release. As long as it
says "8.3", you are running the new release.
Reporting Bugs
Please report any problems in the new release with Athena's sendbug
utility; to do this, type sendbug at the Athena prompt.
- Solaris and IRIX Operating Systems This version of the
Athena release supports the Sun Solaris operating system version 2.6 and the SGI
Irix version 6.5. Solaris 2.6 is not an upgrade, but several small updates
have been applied to the operating system. SGI Irix 6.5 is an upgrade from SGI
Irix 6.3. There should be no major end user visible changes, however private
workstation owners should read the system release notes for further details.
- New Workstations will be deployed in the clusters later
this summer. They will most likely be some more SGI O2 workstations with faster
processors and some Sun ULTRA workstations. More details will be available
later this summer.
- Further Kerberos 5 update. Some resulting changes are:
- The login program treats krb5 authentication as the primary means of
password authorization, rather than krb4, and
kinit will get krb5 tickets and then krb4 tickets instead of
in the reverse order.
- The Kerberos password-changing program (kpasswd) is a
krb5 program instead of a krb4 program.
- The telnet command now defaults to forwarding forwardable tickets.
Previously, you could telnet to another machine using forwarded krb5 tickets,
but the tickets on the remote machine would not themselves be forwardable.
- Two options to the lpr command, which also apply equally to
the lprm command, have been altered with the advent of Kerberos
5. lpr -k, which forced Kerberos 4 authentication, has now been
changed to lpr -A kerberos4, to force Kerberos 4
authentication, and lpr -A kerberos5, which forces Kerberos 5
authentication. To disable Kerberos authentication, which is necessary
to print without Kerberos tickets, the lpr -u command has been
changed to lpr -A none.
- The Kerberos FTP client (ftp) accepts the -f option to
forward tickets.
- The attach suite of programs has been rewritten to use a
new library named liblocker. Changes include:
- Some operations are faster. fsid -a iis now faster, as is
attaching several lockers at once and logging in.
- The -U option (to specify user) to attach and detach
is gone.
- The -L option (remove malformed attachtab entries) to detach is
gone; it is no longer necessary.
- Option parsing for attach and related commands has been improved;
long options can be specified with two leading dashes as well as with one (two
is preferred), and short options can be placed together, e.g. -hnq.
- The attachandrun command has a new option --check or -c, to
check whether an executable exists in the requested location but not run it.
- MH upgraded to nmh; the major user visible changes are:
- The scan command displays real names instead of email addresses in
the from address column. This change also affects the mail listing in mh-e.
If you want to switch back to the old scan format (usernames instead of real
names) you should copy /usr/athena/etc/scan.default into
~/Mail and change both instances of "friendly" to "addr". You will also need to add the line "scan: -form scan.default" to your ~/.mh_profile
- We have configured nmh to display MIME attachments,
including Microsoft Word documents. If you prefer to have MIME turned
off by default, you can add "show: -nocheckmime" to your
~/.mh_profile file and then use the command mhshow
instead of show to reenable MIME support.
- If you wish to display Word documents in Frame instead of as text you
should add "setenv MU_MSWORD frame" to your ~/.environment
file. If you want to display them as HTML in a web browser when possible you
should add "setenv MU_MSWORD html" to your ~/.environment
file. Note that "html" falls back to "frame", not "text"
in the Word 6/7 case, as we do not have the technology to convert Word 6/7 to
HTML.
- If you want to display HTML mail in your web-browser of choice (via htmlview)
instead of as text you should add "setenv MU_HTML html" to your ~/.environment
file. Note that this will also mean that multipart/alternative mail with
both text/plain and text/html parts will be viewed in a web browser (as html) as
well.
- If you previously ran the MIME setup script from the MIME locker, you
should remove the "source /mit/MIME/share/setup.csh" line from your
~/.environment file if you want to use the normal 8.3 MIME support.
- emacs upgraded to version 20.3. Despite the major version
number change, users should not notice many differences in emacs other
than minor improvements. Emacs now has built-in support for
international character sets, and an on-the-fly spell-checking mode is available
as M-x flyspell-mode. A set of international fonts has also been
installed for emacs's use.
- Emacs Discuss, the discuss mode in emacs, has
undergone some improvements:
- Font-lock support has been added.
- discuss-visible-headers can be set to a regexp matching the mail headers to
display in discuss meetings fed by mailing lists. The default value is nil,
which means all headers are displayed except ones matching
discuss-invisible-headers.
- discuss-invisible-headers can be set to a regexp matching mail headers not
to display in discuss meetings fed by mailing lists. The default value excludes
Received headers and envelope From headers. (This corresponds to the default in
rmail and mh-e.)
- When a meeting is exited, the discuss-ls window for that meeting will be
closed.
- If discuss-use-short-meeting-name is set to non-nil, the short name of a
meeting is displayed in the status line, making it less likely for transaction
numbers to get pushed off the right edge of the window.
- LaTeX upgraded to
LaTeX2e The default LaTeX command is now LaTeX2e.
We expect very few problems with old LaTeX documents, since LaTeX2e has
good backward compatibility. Users with problems should contact the On-Line
Consultants with the olc command. There are no longer separate slitex
or
amslatex commands. Users with SliTeX and AMSLaTeX files must add slides
or
amsmath to the documentstyle line and use LaTeX to format
their documents. Users can run add -f newtex to use the old version of
LaTeX as an immediate workaround for any problems they experience.
- xscreensaver Athena now ships a standard X screensaver
command, xss. It is the xscreensaver program written by Jamie Zawinski
and modified to display the screen lock time and to allow logouts after twenty
minutes. Users who are used to the SIPB xscreensaver program should run
xss-button & for a similar interface. Users who want a command to
just lock their screen once and exit (similar to how xlock works) should
run xss -start-locked.
In addition to the changes listed below and elsewhere in this document,
program developers should be sure to read the Athena 8.3 System
Release Notes for details of the many changes involved in the release. The
items included here are only highlights:
In addition to the changes listed below and elsewhere in this document,
private workstation owners should be sure to see the Athena 8.3
System Release Notes for details of the many changes
involved in the release. The items here include only highlights:
- SGI Password Files A notable change in IRIX 6.5 is the
addition of shadow password files. The update to release 8.3 will run the
pwconv command to convert to a shadow passwd setup, and create a shadow.local
file on systems with a passwd.local.
- SGI mail delivery log files are now logged to
/var/spool/mqueue/syslog, as on Solaris. The log file is not
world-readable.
- Kerberos 5 upgrade issues:
- The Kerberos shell daemon (kshd) will now work for users listed in
/etc/athena/access who are not in the local passwd file.
- SSH upgrade Previously, if SSHD was set to switched
in
/etc/athena/rc.conf, the master sshd daemon would only be running on a
system when access_on is in effect. For better security, sshd now always runs
when SSHD is set to switched, but is disabled when access_on is not
in effect.
- Sendmail The Athena release now ships the latest
version of sendmail (8.9.3) rather than the older versions that
normally ship with Solaris and Irix. This is primarily so that mkserv mail machines will not be
open relays by default. Some changes have been made to the release sendmail.cf:
- For machines running a sendmail daemon, only hosts in class R
(which is empty by default) can relay mail through the machine.
- LPRng The print spooling software in the Athena release
has been replaced with LPRng. Backwards compatibility for both server-side and
client-side programs has been incorporated into LPRng, so users should not
notice much of a difference. The configuration of an LPRng print server is
different than for the old Athena spooling software. Athena Server Operations
(ops@mit.edu) will provide help with the conversion of print servers currently
using the Athena print spooling software.
- The Y2K Compliance statement for MIT and other Y2K
information is located at http://mitvma.mit.edu/mity2k/
- Attach
- The same locker can be attached multiple times at different mountpoints.
However, if a locker is attached at a non-default mountpoint, it must be
detached by mountpoint, not by locker name.
- The handling of filesystem options (primarily used for NFS options) is more
flexible. In addition to specifying options which cannot be overridden (options),
attach.conf can specify default options which can be overridden (defoptions)
and can specify a list of allowable options. The release attach.conf moves most
NFS options to the defoptions list.
- Larvnet is the replacement for the old cluster
monitoring software. Client-side support for larvnet was added during
the Athena 8.2 release cycle. Server-side support including the larvnetd
and cviewd daemons is now included in the release.
[Strictly speaking, changes to locker software are not "Athena
release changes," because this software is not tied in with the basic
Athena release. Instead, locker changes are simply "changes to Athena
application software." These changes are listed here because they happen
to coincide with the Athena 8.3 Release.]
Many of the major locker-based Athena applications (MATLAB, Maple, Netscape,
FrameMaker, and Tecplot) are being upgraded over the summer: the newest versions
of each of these will become the default on Athena by the end of the summer.
For more information on third-party software, see the following:
http://web.mit.edu/acs/www/3partysw.html
The significant changes to the third-party software suite include:
- Netscape 4.6.1 is the default. The
following MIT-specific customizations have been made:
- AOL Instant Messenger and Calendar modules are not installed.
- The default Home Page is set to http://web.mit.edu
.
- The default search page is set to http://web.mit.edu/search.html
.
- MIT-specific web pages have been added to the Help menu.
- MIT- and Macintosh-specific bookmarks have been added to the Bookmarks
menu.
- The "Floating Component Bar" is not displayed automatically.
- Smart Browsing, Tool tips and Smart Update have been turned off by default.
- The Default News Server is set to news.mit.edu.
- The talkback module has been disabled.
- Tecplot version 7.5 is primarily a bug fix update and
will become the default later this summer. To use version 7.5 now
add tecplot; tecplot -ver 7.5
More information about this update
is available at:
http://www.amtec.com/Pages_folder/Product_pages/prod4a.html
- Maple upgraded to Version V Release 5.1. Version V
Release 5.1 is primarily a bug fix release and will become the default later
this summer. To run the new version now:
add maple; maple -ver 5.1
For more information on this release take
a look at the "What's New" section in the help menu of Maple version
5.1.
- MATLAB: Version 5.3 will become the default
version of Matlab on Athena later this summer. The Fuzzy Logic
Toolbox is now included in the license. For more information on the
new release, type "whatsnew matlab" from the matlab
command line. For more detailed information, open their Help Desk (in
matlab, typing "helpdesk" will launch it in your web
browser), and see "Release 11 New Features".
In particular, Chapter 4 contains info. on migrating code from earlier
versions. To run version 5.3 now:
add matlab; matlab -ver 5.3
- FrameMaker: Version 5.5.6 is primarily a bug fix release
and will become the default version on Athena later this summer. To find out
more about this release from Help in FrameMaker, select "Online Manuals"
then "Release Notes". To run version 5.5.6 now:
add frame; maker -ver 5.5.6
- Mathematica: Version 4.0 reprsents a major change
from version 3.0; due to licensing constraints, it will be the only
version available in release 8.3. .m files created in Mathematica 3.0
will be usable in version 4.0; the reverse, however, is not
true. Configuration files from the two versions should not be
mixed. Problems caused when starting the new release
may be due to the presence of old version 3 files in the
.Mathematica.$ATHENA_SYS configuration directories. These problems can
sometimes be solved by deleting these directories; Mathematica will
rebuild them for the new release.
- SAS The SAS statistics package on Athena has been
upgraded to release 7.00 by default. The
6.12 release will remain for at least fall 1999; to run this release,
type
add sas; sas -ver 6.12
at your Athena prompt.
This is a major update with many new features
and enhancements, including much improved and
extensive online documentation (both help and online manuals) in html
and pdf formats. You will need to have both Javascript and Java
enabled
in Netscape for this to work properly.
The SAS Institute also has information about new features
on their Web site, starting at
http://www.sas.com/service/doc/v7/whatsnew/. Datasets will be forward but not backward compatible.
The local SAS configuration directory is named sasuser.701 in
this release (by intent of the vendor). Do not mix files
created there with files in the release 6.12 sasuser directory.
Last modified: August 3, 1999
MIT Information
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