The Fellowship of Athena

It's gonna be one year now.

The image of Deepak Lukose writing down Athena's password for us on the back side of my notebook is still fresh in my memory. We were the new admins for Athena; new admins for the software lab. I still remember the first time i logged into Athena as 'root', the first time i used 'sudo' and the first time i read the Logwatch mails for admin. I still cherish the nice feeling looking out into the night through the C hostel window after i threw that password-paper, torn into pieces.

And two days back Vinod sir asked us to find new admins for Athena.

It actually took some time to dawn on me. We are going to give Athena's password to someone. 192.168.40.99 is gonna be someone else's.

The one year of essentially 'ruling' the lab was really an unforgettable period of my life. On the average we spend more than 6 hours per day in the lab. Sreedal started the habit of spending the evenings there first. I followed in a week.

One of the first jobs we had was setting up the lab in the new building. In fact the dept had shifted the comps and had done the networking part by then. We started with the NAT machine. I mean Sreedal started with the nat... i wasn't interested in that machine and still isn't. He actually reconfigured it from scratch. Really nice job it was.

Then came the job of creating user accounts for the second years'. Athena already had the scripts for creating mass accounts. It was actually to create accounts based on a basename and with numbers appended, like gamma19. That's why we were gammas and our seniors were deltas. I modified the script to use names from a file. And the juniors got their roll numbers as their usernames.

The fact that Athena runs on a 64 bit version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) usually make installing things difficult. Source compilations usually get stuck at points like checking the system type and getting the shared libraries. RPM are difficult to find for most of the packages. So the news that we had to install things like Nachos java and Ocaml weren't greeted with enthusiasm. I managed to install the java version of Nachos but the version was pretty bad in itself. Documentation was very poor and ultimately the lab used the cpp version itself. In fact we had to start another server "Nachos Server" (192.168.40.40) with a 32 bit version of FC5 for the lab. We actually ported the user accounts from Athena and Andromeda (with the help of the andro admins) to the new server.

Ocaml was much tougher. I fact we couldn't get it done properly. Luko came to the rescue. He set up Ocaml in time from his home. Yeah, he did it from home. The details can't be disclosed!!

From that point onwards things were much smoother. We found ways to get around many problems. Prolog installation turned out to be difficult but i found a set of static binaries for 64 bit system. That's why Athena has 'Yet Another Prolog' installed rather than gprolog or SWI-Prolog.

One of the things i always wanted to do in Athena was to change the /etc/motd. I had always wanted to greet the users with ascii pics. I actually did a lot of changes.

This was the first screen i set up:



After a few weeks i came up with something like this :



And after some time i settled down with this:


Now Athena is still going on, but its high time that its reinstalled. We asked permission to do it but we were asked to postpone it to the end of March. I hope that would be a befitting goodbye to Athena from two people who cared for her for a whole year.