Goals for FY2004

Overarching Goals

  1. Continue to work with the MIT Libraries on Digital Library work in an advisory and liaison role.
  2. Continue to lead the team with a strong emphasis on strategic review, and matching products and services and work to customer needs. This will involve significant strategy dialogs with directors and customers.
  3. Work to remove obstacles to myself and the team being viewed as platform independent advocates and resources.
  4. Deliver the Athena release, but also to evolve the Athena release to be more customer-centric, and less platform-centric. This may involve quitting calling it "The Athena Release".

Summary Achievements for FY2004

I set a direction for Athena infrastructure evolution, as well as a team organization that proved stable and useful across the transition to the new organization and goals.

Took on role as Linux Platform Coordinator, and shepherded long-overdue roll-out of full support for stand alone Linux and the Red Hat Network update system.

Shepherded progress in getting more customers to migrate off NFS and onto AFS.

Mentored several people through the chaotic reoganization that occurred this year.

Established a pipeline of work that continued to serve our customers while the larger organization continued to ponder changes of direction as a consequence of our reorganization.

Specific deliversbles: Goals Met or Changed

  1. Deploy Athena 9.2 release on Solaris and Linux target date July 15, 2003.
    Status: DONE. Delivered on target date.
  2. Ongoing security patches, and bug fixes throughout the year on Solaris and Linux platforms.
    Status: DONE.
  3. Receive new versions of Solaris and Red Hat Linux OS and various third party libraries, toolsets and applications, and begin their integration for Athena 9.3. Shepherded contract and adoption of Red Hat Enterprise 3 as our Standard Linux both on Athena and stand alone.
    Status: DONE
  4. Perform evaluations and publish recommended configurations for server, desktop and laptop Linux systems from IBM and/or HP, and server and desktop configurations from Sun. Participate in annual Athena renewal using this work. Target completion date: August 15, 2003.
    Status: Desktop: DONE. Published recommendation on 7/29/03.
    Laptop: DELAYED. Reviewed HP Laptop, and sent feedback to HP on 7/24/03.
    IBM Laptop review complete. TODO: Publish recommendations.
    Issues:
  5. New 2/1/04: Participate in qualification of desktop and laptop hardware for FY05.
    Status:This work continued into FY05. Vendors seemed particularly adept at dropping the ball on contacts, forgetting crucial requirements, and screwing up tests and actual orders this year. Complained to vendors that they did WORSE this year than last year.
  6. Solicit funding from Sun Microsystems, and collaborate on new version of Athena integration, installation, and update that uses Sun tools rather than MIT tools. Collaborate also with Peter Kelly's team to meet requirements to have this new method replace their "tarball" method of organizing installations.
    Goals:
    1. Have the Athena team do Peter Kelley's back end install prep work by June 30, 2004.
    2. Have the Athena Solaris install deployed for July 15, 2004 use this new method, and eliminate Athena-unique methods using srvd and track.
    Status: DROPPED owing to reorganization. Some of the work slated for the Sun ERO is now scheduled to be done for Athena 9.3; Some of the work for "Peter Kelley's Team" will change to be useful for "Harold Pakulat's Team".
  7. New: 1/22/04: Shepherd use of internal resources to recraft Solaris Athena to use Sun native tools for install/update and to install all on local disk to make Athena more like non-Athena Solaris. i.e. a Targeted development of a subset of what we would have gotten Sun ERO money to do.
    Status: DONE as part of Athena 9.3 release that went live on 7/15/04.
  8. Produce standards document, and leverage Athena and perhaps Sun work in #7 above to deliver explicit guidance and helpful packaging of software to enable customers to deploy web servers with appropriate functionality, security and maintenance and thereby continue to provide the enterprise-wide web services as in the past but to eliminate the risk of a repeat of this year's many site visits and high cost emergency maintenance activities by June 30, 2004.
    Status: DROPPED. IS&T Reorganization moved this work to Harold Pakulat's team. No standards document is expected, but more sustainable servers for customers are expected.
  9. New 12/22/03: Coordinate release of Red Hat Network or other appropriate update mechanism for stand-alond Linux at MIT.
    Status: DONE! Negotiated Red Hat Enterprise contract which went live 4/1/2004. Deploying the OS, full support, appropriate apps, and RHN update service went live on 7/8/04. Platform coordination duties continue into FY05.
  10. New 1/1/04: Coordinate deployment of useful Linux documentation and software downloads to improve IS support for stand-alone Linux.
    Status: DONE as part of Red Hat Enterprise Software Release Effort that went live on 7/8/04.
  11. Address all first tier deliverables for Athena Laptop Linux disconnected operation by February 1, 2004.
    Status: PROGRESS through the year, but never completed. This effort kept getting shoved on the back burner by other work, and also was negatively impacted by vendor intransigence when we wanted to work laptop Linux issues.
  12. New: 6/1/03: AFS Everywhere: a mini project which explores appropriateness of expanding use of AFS by clients outside of Traditional Athena, and by customers with departmental file servers.
    Status: PROGRESS 1/27/04 Stand-alone Linux client delivered to customers on 1/22/04.
  13. Engage in a strategic discussion on instant messaging. Options:
    1. Migrate off Zephyr to a third party IM on all platforms.
    2. Make no change: continue present mix on various platforms.
    3. Identify and complete small projects to give users access to third party IM on strategic platforms, and to unify disparate zephyr, and multi-protocol IM efforts.
    Status: DELAYED. 8/13/03: Investigated AOL Enterprise IM. It's big. It's complex. Hallway chat with jis suggests that a jabber server would be a much simpler approach to interoperation. With the IS&T reorganization this effort has been shoved to the farthest back burner.
  14. Document differences between Athena Linux and stock Red Hat Linux. Publish road map for project work to eliminate inappropriate duplicate effort by January 1, 2004. Examples: Place of Red Hat Update service. Possibility of Athena install on top of pre-installed Linux instead of "wipe and clean install".
    Status: DELAYED. 6/30/04 This never shipped, again due to other work displacing it. Will try and ship someting in FY05.
  15. Recraft Athena Solaris and UNIX documentation in terms of platform-independent "MIT services" instead of "Athena services" by June 30, 2004.
    Status: DELAYED (DROPPED?). 6/30/04 This was an idea my boss agreed to in principle, but when push came to shove there was never convergence on how to make the work real.
  16. Leveraging off work in #11 above, craft documentation for the Mac OS X platform that publicises MIT services presently available.
    Status: DELAYED (DROPPED?). 6/30/04 This was an idea my boss agreed to in principle, but when push came to shove there was never convergence on how to make the work real.
  17. Draft a work plan for work to migrate to more comprehensive versions of MIT services on UNIX platforms, itemizing MIT-invented services for replacement with 3rd party services. Goal: a plan for specific activities to maximize functionality and cross-platform harmony while minimizing ongoing maintenance efforts by June 30, 2004.
    Status: DELAYED (DROPPED?). 6/30/04 This was an idea my boss agreed to in principle, but when push came to shove there was never convergence on how to make the work real.

Goals Archive

Last updated: $Date: 2004/09/02 20:37:57 $ by $Author: wdc $.
Bill Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>