(Disclaimer: I work for MIT Information Services & Technology blah blah blah I am a student blah blah these are only my words and do not represent the opinion(s) of my employer.)
Way back in the day in 1983,
MIT started something it called Project Athena, which had the goal of investigating how computers could be used to enhance education at
MIT. This project became the origin of such pieces of software as the X Window System and Kerberos, as well as a campus-wide network of workstations all running similar software. In 1991, Project Athena ended, but the Athena system continued on, taken over by
MIT Information Systems.
It’s 2008, and
Athena still exists at
MIT—walk into a computing cluster, and chances are all the machines will be running Athena software. (Unless that particular cluster has been taken over be Athena’s evil sibling, often referenced as “WinAthena”, which often seems to be maintained by no one, and whose existence is sometimes denied by those who maintain and support Real Athena. Not many machines have suffered this agonizing fate, luckily.)
Unfortunately, as the years have progressed recently, fewer and fewer resources have been put into the development of Athena. In many ways it is no longer on the cutting edge of things as it has been in the past, though it is certainly still useful. Some students these days, however, even think of Athena as only “their
MIT email” or maybe use it occasionally to print something in a cluster on the way to class. I’ve seen people grow frustrated and storm out of a cluster due to things like
instructions for using a flash drive that involve more steps than just plugging it in. While on the one hand it’s easy to laugh at people for a lack of patience or being open to a computing system that is not either Windows or Mac and perhaps a bit more complicated on the surface, on the other hand, some of these things really
should just work by now, and on other
UNIX-based systems they
do—but Athena has lagged behind.
When you log into an Athena workstation for the first time, you are confronted with what looks like this:
That’s
GNOME 2.8, and it looks kind of like the
GNOME 2.8 default but uglier. When you look under the hood, there are pieces of the system that obviously originated in a time where nothing better existed and so something new had to be created—the “xlogin” login system doesn’t support
PAM, and the login path involves a hairy maze of scripts that perform various tasks. Under the hood, the base OS is currently
RHEL 4 or Solaris 10. I still can’t remember what the right options are to feed
RPM whenever I need some information that I think I should be able to get from it. These things were once necessary but today just look crufty.
Some people have tossed around the idea that everyone has a laptop these days and thus clusters are uselessly expensive, but it’s been met with a lot of resistance. I’m all for progress, but I use clusters all the time! They’re one thing that makes it an easy choice for me to have a really portable laptop, because when I really need computing power or screen space on campus away from my room, there is always a cluster nearby. They’re also nice isolated places that can be associated with “work mode”, which is good for productivity. Beyond all this, Athena provides a common platform that all technical classes can depend on, from providing standard and specialized academic software to standing as a baseline of “make sure your code works on this before handing it in because that is how it will be graded”.
At any rate, things are finally happening on this front. Athena can’t stay
RHEL 4 forever—while
AFS allows non-system software to be easily updated for all machines without requiring any OS release, hardware moves on and compatibility is lost, and the rest of the world is coming up with new awesome things that Athena machines are missing out on. A student group that I am vaguely involved with,
SIPB, took the early initiative with this and created
DebAthena, which takes stock Debian and Ubuntu and allows it to closely resemble an Athena environment. We even run a campus Linux dialup using the packages. (I won’t claim to have done much work on DebAthena myself because, well, I didn’t.) Amazingly, the Athena release team has decided to work with the
SIPB on the next release of Athena.
So, what I really just wasted over 600 words prepping for is to say that
Athena 10 will be based on Ubuntu. This is only relatively new news, but I am lame about finishing blog posts. There are a
variety of reasons why Ubuntu was chosen over Debian. Some of them are lame and some of them are not. Even so, I am excited about this prospect—and it should be possible to peripherally support Debian in such a way that was not possible with Athena 9.4.
I really like Athena. Even coming to
MIT with a background in Linux there has been a steep learning curve, though, and I think that things could be better. Lots of people here have their first encounter with a ‘nix system in the form of Athena, and we should strive to make that experience as good as possible. I’m kind of skeptical on the expected release date of this upcoming summer, but as long as it happens soon it will be a big step forward.
In some ways it’s kind of sad that I’m excited about a big part of a research institution catching up with others—but inertia is a strong force, and dealing with thousands of workstations is no trivial task. I kind of long for the exciting days of creating new big pieces of free software like X. I bet I imagine those days as being better than they actually were.
First, and most important: while researching a functional bug for a
client, I found a rather important security problem in GForge. All
versions (starting from 3.1) are vulnerable to an SQL injection
problem due to missing input sanitisation. Debian packages have
already been fixed and released, and the patches have been committed
to the upstream Subversion repository, so non-Debian users are
encouraged to grab the patches from there. For instance, the patches
for the 4.5.* branch can be obtained from the ViewVC
page.
For reference, the CVE ID for this problem is CVE-2008-0173.
Secondly, there's a new "gforge" tag on this blog, to filter posts
that relate to GForge. I mainly created it in response to the
existence of a feed
aggregator
focusing on forges and variants, but you can also subscribe to it
directly if you only want to hear about Gforge and not about my other
Free Software activities. I'll also use it to announce security
patches like this one.
First I want to say shame on you for plain out laying. I had the laptop in service once, not twice. That was for the battery. The 
I've been a bit behind with the ISC DHCP v3 package of late. I've had a
package of 3.1.0 for a few months, but I'm becoming more and more reluctant
to make uploads of this package without giving it some rudimentary testing.
Real life has been demanding of late, so I haven't had a chance to do that
testing. Nothing's gone wrong with the package to date, I just feel
negligent not giving it some basic testing before throwing it out there.
So I chucked a spare QFE card in my workstation brutus, put
unstable on the second hard drive, installed Debian unstable on the spare
10G partition of Sarah's old PowerBook, and lashed the two together with a
bit of CAT-5, and voila, instant DHCP client/server testbed.
So now that I'd verified that version 3.1.0 wasn't blatantly broken, I could
have a fiddle with the new support for option 119 (domain-search) that has
people at work very excited. I spent a bit of time off on a wild goose chase
trying to figure out how to configure the DHCP server for this new option
before I realised it was as simple as option domain-search "foo bar
baz"; and then made the necessary tweaks to dhclient-script.
I'm figuring that since one of the blokes who wrote 
Sound Juicer "Now There's Emptiness In My Bed" 2.21.2 is available now. Tarballs
are available 
after neglecting her for over four months I took "felicidad" (my
western guitar) out of her case tonight. at the beginning of today's date
she was quite "
What a disaster! 
but otherwise, everything is so twisted, so jumbled or so gone, it is beyond stunning. She certainly knew I was around and helping for she got upset when she knew I was leaving, often bursting in tears, asking me to take her to New York. But she just knew me as Gabriella from Nueva York who brought her novio bueno to PR and not as anyone else.
It is certainly not easy to see this, to experience it day in and out but it is what it is and there is no running from it. Logistically it is also beyond hard to take care of my mom. To get her to eat, to calm down after one of her morning fits (she always, always, always had a raging fit in the morning, the afternoon and evenings being far more calm periods), to convince her to wear her dentures (which is the only remedy to stop her from spitting all over the place), to dress her, to deal with her in the middle of the night, often twice, are all extraordinarily challenging. Very quickly, your waking hours fill up with seemingly endless tasks and this I guess is, in some respects, a hidden blessing; there is just a lot less time to ruminate over how all of this, frankly, sucks. It is only later, late at night, early in the morning, or on the plane ride home where the darkness of her life would set deeply into my own.
It may be obvious why this state and experience is tough but there are two parts that I find particularly rough. If my mother’s state is one of near total chaos and entropy, there is one thing that is utterly clear. She knows she is suffering and she wants out. On particularly bad days, she would mutter or sometimes yell loudly that she wants to die and would ask for the medicine that would accomplish this. She would even sometimes call me mala for not giving her this medicine. It is certainly not the case that everyone with Alzheimers goes through what my mother does. Apparently, some experience the illness quietly and peacefully. This is so not the case for my mother, who lived a particularly hard yet vibrant life. Donning a difficult personality, she lived lived as fully as she could and it is clear that as life leaves her, she would rather not be around to experience what is a cruel exorcism of self. Thankfully, she is not constantly or not even mostly in a suicidal state. I think she at times forgets how lousy she feels and rather enjoys the rather limited life she has. And at this point, I just hope that she continues to have calm or even happy moments.
The second surprise concerns my own memories. My mother has had this rare form of Alzheimers, 
Those who keep track, will know that I started writing 
Something awry on Gmail this evening... I've been having status messages — you know, the yellow/orangish overlay on top of the page that usually shows when an action has finished — telling me that "the system encountered a problem" for a few hours now while reading my email, intermittently.
I bought one of the new terabyte drives, to double the storage space on my
home network. I put it in a Thecus, so I have a terabyte of storage in a
computer about the size of my 
An article by Sam Varghese appeared on ITwire today, entitled
