MIT Project Athena will be available at USENIX ...

[Henry Mensch]

In article <371 at usenix.ORG> sonya at usenix.UUCP (Sonya Neufer) writes:
|
|The terminal room will have a Sun 3/80 with QIC 11, QIC 24 and a
|9-track tape drive.  Facilities will be available to make QIC 11,
|QIC 24 and Exabyte tapes from AnDATAco's booth on the show floor
|as well.
|
|It is possible the Terminal Room will have Exabyte and TK50 facilities
|as well.

I will bring the single tape that MIT Project Athena just began to
distribute recently to the terminal room for distribution by the tape
copy facility described above.  A description of the software (in
particular, the top-level README from that tape) is appended below.

REFERENCE:


Welcome to the Project Athena Network Services Software (PANSS) tape. 
This tape contains many of the applications and network services
software in daily use at MIT's Project Athena; this software makes it
easy to manage and use a large workstation environment.

All the software and documentation on this tape is covered by the MIT
Copyright, except where otherwise noted.   Exact, complete copyright
notices are included in the software; the notice below gives the reader
some idea of the content of the MIT copyright notice.

    PERMISSION to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software
    and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby
    granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all
    copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission
    notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of
    M.I.T. not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to
    distribution of the software without specific, written prior
    permission.  M.I.T. makes no representations about the
    suitability of this software for any purpose.  It is provided
    "as is" without express or implied warranty.

Some of the software on this tape is not necessarily commercial quality,
and may require some sweat-equity (i.e., work) to operate in your
environment.  We know this software works under 4.3 BSD on IBM RT/PCs
and on various Digital Equipment Corporation VAX architectures, and with
ULTRIX 3.1 on VAX architectures; work is in progress to bring some of
these services to a variety of other platforms, including some common PC
software platforms.  This software will ultimately become available on
future editions of the PANSS tape, and the organization of software will
likely change for the next edition of the tape.  

Future editions of the PANSS tape will be announced on the USENET, on
various large Internet mailing lists, and on the info-panss mailing list
(to be added to this list; please send e-mail to
info-panss-request at MIT.EDU). Please don't call Project Athena or the MIT
Technology Licensing Office with queries about the content and schedule
of future tapes; the time spent answering those queries can be better
used producing software for the next tape.

We presume that the person(s) attempting to install this software are
experienced UNIX systems programmers, and already have some knowledge
about the Athena model of workstation computing and the particular
network services (presumably from reading the appropriate papers
presented at USENIX conferences).   

What follows is a brief description of the software included on this
tape; a more detailed description of all the Athena software (some of
which is not included on this tape, but may be included on future tapes)
is attached.  There are five top-level directories on the tape: 
applications, documents, libraries, sendmail-cfs, and services.  There
is also a README file at the top level which contains this text.

The services directory contains the source for the basic Athena network
services: Hesiod, Kerberos, Moira, and Zephyr, as well as the Remote
Virtual Disk (RVD) system developed at MIT's Laboratory for Computer
Science.  

7 Kerberos: If your tape was delivered to an address outside the United
States of America, the kerberos source is actually a modified version of
the Kerberos authentication system.  All calls to the DES library have
been removed in the export version of Kerberos, and thus the export
version of Kerberos will not be useful as supplied.  This software can
be made useful by adding the DES calls to the appropriate parts of the
source; while this is a non-trivial task, it isn't an impossible task,
and a skilled UNIX Systems Programmer should be able to do this work in
short order (provided, of course, that this programmer understands how
Kerberos works as described in the documentation and the Usenix paper). 
Neither MIT nor Project Athena are able to assist in this work.  

7 Zephyr and Moira require that Kerberos be installed, since these
services use Kerberos-style authentication in their work.  

7 Hesiod does not require Kerberos for operation, but (particularly for
large environments) it may be useful to use Moira to manipulate the
Hesiod database.

The sendmail-cfs directory contains sendmail configuration files for a
workstation client and a mailhub; these are known to work with sendmail
release 5.59 and later.   

The libraries directory on this tape is empty, save for a README file
which explains this fact.  The libraries which will appear in this space
in the future actually live elsewhere on the tape; unfortunately, as
software development efforts progressed, different versions of some
locally-created libraries came to be used by different services and
applications.  We hope to have this fixed for the next version of this
tape.  

The documents directory contains just that: documents.  In particular,
it contains documents which we distribute on our anonymous FTP server. 
Right now, this directory only contains documents which describe the
Palladium print system.  The software to accompany this documentation
may appear on a future edition of this tape.

The applications directory contains several applications which we
created or modified for use in a large workstation environment.

7 track is an application which originated at Bellcore.  It provides a
convenient way to maintain system software on client workstations.  
7 mh.6.6 contains the source for the Rand Mail Handler system.  Some of
its applications have been modified to use the Post Office Protocol;
some of those POP applications have been further modified to use
Kerberos as the means of authentication.  

7 gms is the Global Message System, which we use to provide
message-of-the-day  (motd) service in the workstation environment.  gms
uses the Hesiod and Zephyr services.

7 gdb provides the means to access a relational database over the
network.  This particular version of gdb expects the database on the
server side to be an RTI Ingres database; if your database is of another
type, you will have to modify gdb accordingly.

7 discuss is a  distributed electronic conferencing system that allows
users to communicate in a set of electronic "meetings".  In short,
discuss provides public and private meetings, where transactions
(messages) are stored indefinitely.  discuss uses a client/server model
of networking; clients contact servers over TCP/IP streams to access
individual meetings.  To authenticate users over the network, discuss
uses the Kerberos authentication system; in the single machine case,
discuss does not rely on Kerberos.

7 delete is the set of programs written to solve the problem of
retrieving accidentally-deleted files.  

The most current versions of all Project Athena software are always
available on our anonymous FTP server; this service is only available if
you are directly connected to the Internet with the TCP/IP protocol
suite (please don't call to ask that we send you tape copies of the
latest version of something; we are  unable to comply with such
requests).   A one-page handout which describes this process will
accompany this document.

We are interested to hear about your experiences with the software on
this tape; if you want to submit a bug report, use the e-mail address
provided with the specific network service.  If you can't find what
looks like a reasonable address in the documentation of the particular
network service, you may report bugs by sending e-mail to
bug-panss at MIT.EDU.  Please keep in mind that we are not a software
house, and don't have a large staff dedicated to supporting off-site
users; we will be glad to provide whatever assistance we can, but cannot
promise much in the way of support for this software.

Written comments may be sent via postal mail to:

	Henry Mensch
	MIT Project Athena
	External Relations Group
	E40-379 MIT
	One Amherst Street
	CAMBRIDGE, MA  02139
	UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



-- henry mensch / <henry at mit.edu>
-- project athena external relations