[Linerva-announce] Linerva has been retired

[Alex Dehnert]

Around 1AM, Linerva crashed with a kernel BUG in OpenAFS. We were
unable to recover the running system.

In accordance with our retirement plan, users should now use
athena.dialup.mit.edu instead; connecting to linerva.mit.edu or
linux.mit.edu will now suggest using athena.dialup.

As we announced a few days ago, we were planning to retire Linerva as
a SIPB service this week. Rather than restoring service for a few
days, we took this as an opportunity to complete the transition. Based
on discussions with IS&T, we decided the simplest and clearest
approach was to disable the linerva.mit.edu and linux.mit.edu
names. Effective immediately, connections to those names produce an
error message suggesting using athena.dialup.mit.edu
instead. This avoids the difficulty and ongoing support burden of
transitioning the names to IS&T, and ensures everyone is aware of the
change.

The Linerva webpage, https://web.mit.edu/linerva/www/, has more 
information on the features athena.dialup provides, how to use 
athena.dialup for long-running sessions, and other questions you may have.

Feel free to contact linerva at mit.edu with any additional comments or 
questions.

--
Alex Dehnert
for the SIPB Linerva team
linerva at mit.edu

On Sat, 25 Jan 2014, Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We're reserving an outage window between 6 AM on Tuesday, January 28 and 6 AM 
> on Friday, January 31 for an upgrade to Linerva.
>
> The upgrade will most likely take the form of moving the "linerva.mit.edu" 
> and "linux.mit.edu" names to IS&T's athena.dialup.mit.edu pool, and 
> retirement of the Linerva service. Our goals with the Linerva project were 
> primarily to provide a Linux-based dialup for general use to the MIT 
> community. Since athena.dialup has been running Debathena on Ubuntu for a few 
> years now, this goal is complete and provided by IS&T's full-time server 
> operations team. athena.dialup is a pool of servers currently running Ubuntu 
> 12.04 LTS codename "precise", 64-bit.
>
> We're still working out details of the transition with IS&T server ops, and 
> it is entirely possible that logistical difficulties will prevent us from 
> completing this transition before the end of IAP. Should that happen, we will 
> still need to upgrade Linerva, as our current OS (Debian 6.0 codename 
> "squeeze") will end its support lifecycle during the spring term. In that 
> case, we will be upgrading to Debian 7 codename "wheezy".
>
> We'll send a follow-up announcement with precise timing once we have final 
> plans, and we will also send messages to all logged-in users. We thank you 
> for your support of Linerva over the years, and as always, if you have any 
> questions or commments, feel free to contact us at linerva at mit.edu.
>
> -- 
> Geoffrey Thomas
> SIPB Linerva team
> linerva at mit.edu
>