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Alan Silverman CN/DCI
The UNIX Workstation section in CN's
Desktop Computer Infrastructure
group supports a number of flavours of UNIX for
the different CERN-recommended workstation
vendors. As the vendors release new versions of their operating systems, we
take the necessary steps to check that we can use them in our environment. This
includes obtaining compatible versions of associated vendor and public domain
tools and utilities, checking and updating our installation tools and user
documentation, and working with other teams, especially AFS,
the CERN Program Library
and ASIS, to make sure that a new release causes no problems
for them or for users.
We have decided to formalise this procedure, which we are calling Operating System Certification. For those interested in the background, it is described in the paper CN/DPG/96-8, available from the CN Secretariat or in the Web page http://wsspinfo.cern.ch/file/certified.html. The list of CERN products and tools which are tested against each new version can be summarised as those which are recommended by UMTF (User Migration Task Force) for the UNIX environment found on DCI-supported Work Group Servers and public UNIX nodes (CERNSP, HPPLUS, etc). These include the HEPiX scripts, the pine mailer, emacs, the tcsh and zsh shells, and so on. The full list can be consulted on: http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/umtf/wg/tf/tools-people.html.
Of course the PRO version of CERNLIB is also checked against the latest releases.
We will attempt in each issue of CNL to publish the latest level of each UNIX architecture which we have certified. The first list, as we get started with this new procedure, is as follows:
Latest news on the certification procedure will be published in the newsgroups associated with each UNIX flavour (for example cern.hp) and summarised in the Web page listed above and in each coming CNL.
