Athena Release 7.7 for IAP 1996

Before the start of the Spring semester, the software on Athena workstations will be updated. This software release is only a minor release (a "patch" release) and does not constitute a full new release of the Athena system (the release number remains 7.7, for example). The release focuses on minor changes such as bug fixes, security enhancements, and vendor-supplied updates.

As always, if you have questions about the release you can contact an Athena consultant by typing olc at the athena% prompt, stopping by 11-115, or by calling x3-4435. If you believe that you have encountered a bug in the release, please use sendbug to send in a report.

I. How to Tell if Your Workstation has Updated

To check whether the workstation your are using has been updated, type:

  athena%  tail -1  /etc/athena/version

Updated workstations will indicate the following versions:

  DEC    Version 7.7P        
  IBM    Version 7.7O
  Sun    Version 7.7V
  SGI    Version 0.8E

II. User Visible Changes

The changes that most users are likely to encounter include:

• The error message "KDC reply did not match expectations" will no longer appear. The binaries kinit, login.krb, login, and xlogin have been updated to address this Kerberos 5 error.
• On SGI workstations, help will now start up a web browser displaying Athena documents, as it already does on other Athena platforms.

III. Other Changes

All Platforms

• krb.conf has been updated.

AIX

• There has been a 3.2.5 Install patch. This is for operational purposes.

SGI

• A change has been made in snmpd so that, in the future (i.e., after a necessary server-side change takes place), SGI workstations will appear in the workstation status lists produced by cview and xcluster.

Solaris

• The directory /var/opt has been removed and will now be a link to /srvd/var/opt.
• The sendmail daemon will no longer be running on workstations in the Athena cell.
• There was a cleanup of sendmail temporary files in /etc/init.d/athena.
• There was a cleanup of assorted file ownerships.
• Additional kernel and system support has been added for MAE (the Macintosh Application Environment available on the workstations in 2-032). This included adding kernel drivers and modifying /etc/devlink.tab. There was also a change introduced to xlogin to address a limitation of the current MAE software regarding network activity. (This is likely to be of interest only to private workstation owners who would like to use MAE and happen to have PUBLIC=true).

IV. If your workstation has not updated

If your machine has not updated, you should contact your cluster manager, for departmental athena workstations, or the Cluster Support Services Team (x3-1410, hotline@mit.edu), for machines in other Athena clusters.