Linux Computing at MIT
By: Rob Reilly
Tuesday, May 30, 2006 09:06:26 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6236/1/
From Red Line to Online
Exiting the Red Line Cambridge subway station, I turned left and headed south on Massachusetts Avenue. I was on my way to meet Jonathan Reed, Athena Consulting Supervisor, at MIT. Reed supervises the team that supports the campus-wide UNIX and Linux environment.
Naturally, you'd expect widespread Linux use at MIT. Over the past few years, MIT's Information Systems & Technology (IS&T) group, including Reed's team, have streamlined the process of installing, updating, and running Linux on student's and faculty machines. One interesting goal of the team is to give incoming freshmen the option to order a laptop with Linux pre-installed.
Running a technical support group for a sophisticated user community like MIT, is no small feat. Processes must be quick and foolproof. Just like any other managed user community, standards help maintain reliability and availability. And, every fall brings a new corps of users. Considering the killer workload of the students and professors, the last thing anybody needs are computer-related distractions.
Reed's group keeps Unix, Linux, and Athena running smoothly.
Athena History
Athena started out in 1983 as a suite of programs used by the faculty on a Woods Hole projects that ran on Unix mainframes. Researchers needed a collection of programs that they could use for modeling data and performing analysis.
Early on, the Athena group adopted the Andrew File System (AFS). This environment (created sometime before 1985) was employed by Carnegie Mellon University and was specifically invented to provide network file sharing capabilities for academic users.
Athena also integrated the Zephyr messaging system, similar to the Unix "talk" and "write" programs. It allowed users on MIT's network to collaborate electronically.
The X Windowing system also came about as a result of Athena and it's refinement.
Over time, the Athena environment has been ported over to Solaris and Red Hat, from the original Berkeley 4.3 Unix system.
Reed's group not only administers the Athena environment, but also supports the entire MIT Linux community of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 machines. Windows and Mac boxes are supported by the another group called the Computing Helpdesk.
Evolving To Today
Reed was a student in 1997, working on his degree in Urban Studies and Planning. He joined the IS&T group as a student employee in 1998 and became a full-time staff member in 2002. Yes, he does have a fair amount of CS background, starting out on Red Hat Linux 4.
The Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) was the original group that built their own version of Athena on Linux. SIPB acted like a modern LUG, except that they worked across systems within the entire computing environment.
"Students probably used lots of distributions, but RedHat 3.0.3 was the first version of Linux that SIPB ported Athena to," Reed said.
Around 1999-2000 Reed's group picked up supporting Athena Linux from SIPB. Another group within IS&T picked up the development tasks. Back then, it was supported as Athena, not Slackware or another Linux distribution.
Around the same time, Linux was being evaluated at MIT, both by students and departments/labs, in order to standardize on a distribution. All manner of distributions were examined including SUSE, Debian, TurboLinux, Slackware, and Red Hat. Red Hat become the choice. Versions 7 and 8 were used.
2001 brought Red Hat Enterprise 2.1 (based on Red Hat 7.2) and a pilot program to test Linux viability with users.
By late 2002 the group had settled on Red Hat Enterprise 3.
In 2002-3 the main support/release team was formed and officially supporting Linux. The team went on to initiate a regular Linux update process.
The group moved to Red Hat Enterprise 4 in 2005.
Managing Today
Tier 1 support is usually provided by students. Tier 2 and 3 level support tasks are carried out by higher level students and staffers.
The team has roughly 15-20 students (on tier 1) and a mixture of 15-20 Mac and Windows support people. Amazingly, there are only 2 full-time Red Hat & Athena support staffers. The total number in the overall group is about 40 members. Not bad, when you consider that there are 773 Linux Athena users, 498 Solaris Athena users, and over 10,000 registered plain Red Hat users. Those numbers are expected to keep growing.
There are currently 9 major Athena applications that run on Windows and Macs. Most of the Athena applications run on Linux.
Keeping all the Linux based computers running with the latest patches and programs has received special attention. The Athena group utilizes Red Hat's Network Service in-house update via a satellite server. The satellite server also allows creation of specialized custom updates. Updates to individual machines typically happen around 3 AM.
Proof that the MIT Information Services and Technology group (including the Athena Linux team) are doing a good job, is reflected in their Web site. They have mapped out virtually every detail of computing at the university, that you could imagine.
The gamut of computing topics are covered, from being a rank beginner, up through how to get hooked into the Athena clusters.
Students might first want to visit the main MIT Athena and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Web page. Next stop could be the page that lists existing Linux supported applications. Finally, a quick click to the MIT Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 update page, will tell all about making Linux run great on the student's machine.
Back on the Subway
MIT has a thriving Linux community. Their support groups are efficient and encouraging. And they satisfy the needs of specialized research oriented applications with Athena. They are a model of how a university-sized Linux user community, can be managed.
As I took my seat on the subway, I noticed a clean-cut young man intently scanning a series of complicated equations in a workbook. There was no text and the guy looked like he was easily calculating the answers in his head.
I remember saying to myself, "Yup, this is MIT and I bet that guy has a Linux laptop in his backpack."
Rob Reilly is a consultant, trend spotter, and writer. He advises clients on portable computing, presentation technology, and business process integration. He is also a contributing editor for Linux Today. You can visit his web page at http://home.earthlink.net/~robreilly.