Re: athena

[Seth Teller <seth@graphics.lcs.mit.edu>]

peter, i agree that athena would be a good thing to have in the
lab.  the students maintained an athena SGI some years ago (i
paid the athena fees that existed then), and got decent use from
it.

regarding the issues you raise (space, adel's time, and h/w
budget).  space and money are cheap.  time is not (patrick, you
can misquote me on that).  time, including adel's time, is the
limiting factor here.  what you propose would increase the 
heterogeneity of the lab in two ways:  s/w (athena) and h/w 
(sun platform), and therefore increase his maintenance load
far more than, say, adding another O2.

one way to ameliorate this is for students to take the lead
on the acquisition and install. 

adel, can you comment?  how painful would it be to support 
linux & sun athena in the lab?  would you be comfortable if
the students were to do it themselves?

so, here are a couple of suggestions:

  1) for now, let's do a trial run with one linux and one SGI
machine (not sun).  yes, SGI is degenerating, but there's still
much use in that configuration, and setting it up should be 
easy for the students with little overhead for adel.  (adel, 
can you help them find space in the lab for two new heads, or 
one new head with an appropriate switch?)

  2) get me some plausible numbers for a) a suitable fast 
sparc machine and b) person-hours to set up and maintain it
as athena linux.  i'll discuss with adel where to go next.

seth.


To: bmg@graphics.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: athena
Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2003 21:15:31 -0500
From: Luka <luka@MIT.EDU>

there's been some interest expressed in having an athena workstation or
two in the graphics lab.  i looked into this and here's the latest data.

there is a zero-cost athena option available where you support the
workstations yourself rather than having I/S do it (as used to be
the required case a few years ago).  i sent adel links on how this
works which he should be reviewing.

on specific machine types:

- sgi's are being desupported by athena, so you can expect the locker
software and athena package support for them to start decaying rapidly.
(the locker builds for sgi are already rather impressively crufty.)
also, the sgi installer is a bit finicky, and will not install very
politely unless it recognizes the exact disk hardware and such that is
on the machine as very-close to the official athena config.  so sgi
athena might be a bad idea.

- linux is ok.  the installer is fairly robust and will pretty much
"just work" on any modern pc hardware.  much locker sw works on linux
these days but there are still some gaps, on various big packages.
notably autocad does not run on linux.  notably inventor does run.

- sun is probably the preferred platform.  pretty much anything that
ran on sgi now runs on either sun or linux, with a tendency toward
sun first for the big packages.  notably autocad runs on sun.  i do
not know about inventor/etc.  note that the weight of solaris/athena
is pretty heavy these days and while it will work on something as old
as a sparc5 that is kinda painful.. at least an early ultrasparc is
recommended for a comfortable install.

so i think getting one sun and one linux athena machine in the lab
would be a nice configuration at face value.  contingencies are:
1. space to put them somewhere
2. an ok from adel on maintainance and any I/S issues
3. budget for hardware

(1) is a serious consideration i leave open on the table.

(2) is waiting for feedback from adel.

(3) is probably a non-issue for linux since pc's are utterly cheap.
    for sun, i'd say if we just want to give it an initial try then
    use a sparc5-ish machine just because they are virtually free
    (heck i even have one at home), but if we know we want to have
    this as a useful machine rather than a questionable space usage
    then spring for a fully current ultrasparc model (they are
    reasonably priced as serious workstation market goes).

that's about it.  comments from others?

-pl