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Overview of the Project

Computing Services at Carnegie Mellon University operates eight general access computing labs. They are primarily used by undergraduate students either for homework and projects or as classrooms for hands-on computing sessions. The labs are equipped with computers running Mac OS, Linux, Solaris and Windows. Computing Services also operates one specialty multimedia computer lab equipped with computers running Mac OS and Windows.

Our 160 Macintosh computers are located in five general labs and in the multimedia lab. In the fall of 2003, they will include "blue & white" Power Mac G3s, Power Mac G4s, and flat-panel iMacs. For more information on the hardware, see the Cluster Services web site.

The Applications Software Group migrated to Mac OS X version 10.1 in most of the Mac labs in time the fall 2002 semester. The remaining Macs with Mac OS 9 are in two rooms that house specialized multimedia equipment. We will update all our Macs, including those rooms, to Mac OS X 10.2 over the summer of 2003. We currently maintain a collection of about 70 applications on the Macs.

User Configuration

Here's a high-level view of how users will interact with our configuration of Mac OS X.

We plan to set up our Macs to:

1) Require users to log in using their general university user-id (Andrew ID) and password. The login process is integrated with Kerberos so users won't need to re-enter their password when using Kerberized services such as e-mail or telnet.

2) Store preferences and settings in the user's Andrew home directory, located on an OpenAFS file server. Customized preferences will follow the user to any of the Macs in our clusters. (In Microsoft Windows, this concept is called roaming profiles.)

3) Give users the option to store files in OpenAFS by creating a link to their Andrew home directory. Large graphics files or digital video would probably exceed the file space quota assigned to each user, but space is sufficient for most other projects. (50 - 100 MB per user)

Installation Tools

As part of migrating to Mac OS X 10.1, we set up tools to automate the installation and maintenance of the operating system and applications. Since that time, better tools have become available so different tools are used for 10.2.

For 10.1, we used NetBoot and Apple Software Restore (ASR) to initially install Mac OS X. NetBoot started Mac OS 9 on the target system and automatically launched the graphical ASR to restore our Mac OS X image to the disk. We also used Netboot and ASR to rebuild the system on cluster computers when necessary. RsyncX was used nightly to restore the software collection to a reference state. (Under earlier versions of Mac OS, RevRDist maintained our collection.)

One of the enhancements in 10.2 is a version of ASR that runs natively under Mac OS X as a command-line tool. Mac OS X Server 10.2 introduced a version of NetBoot that can boot the client into Mac OS X instead of Mac OS 9. We will use this improved combination of NetBoot and ASR for our 10.2 labs. We've replaced RsyncX with Radmind as the tool for maintaining the software collections.

For 10.1, an Xserve running Mac OS X Server 10.1 provided NetBoot service, the ASR image files, and the RsyncX server. For 10.2, we'll have two Xserves sharing the load of NetBoot. The ASR images and Radmind server don't need to be on Mac OS X, so we will test the performance and scaling abilities of our solution with those components hosted on either the Xserves or a third server running Linux.

The initial setup and configuration of Mac OS X 10.1 required about 3-4 FTE staff for part of spring through the summer of 2002. During the fall and spring semesters, we had 1.5 FTE staff members and a part-time student assistant to handle maintenance tasks. The effort for setting up 10.2 has dropped to 2-2.5 FTE staff. Much of the effort will focus on the two multimedia rooms that have specialized audio and video hardware and a number of complex applications.

Concerns

As we prepared our first deployment of Mac OS X, our primary concern was that some essential software had not been released or announced for Mac OS X. Chief among them were Adobe Premiere, Macromedia Director, and formZ from auto-des-sys, Inc. We postponed updating the advanced multimedia labs because software versions for several specialty applications weren't available. We did not want to run Classic in the labs, but decided to add it to our configuration late in the summer in order to accomodate the non-native versions of formZ and Director.

A summary of concerns for our Mac OS X 10.2 deployment will be provided at a later time.