ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (02/14/90)
I'm getting a lot of email with questions about the exact status of ISIS V2.0, mostly from people who are about to pick up the system and don't want to do so twice in a row. The picture is as follows: My group has been running V2.0 with the bypass code disabled for a while now, and although we are still finding bugs, the frequency is definitely down. However, this internal alpha-release lacks the process list facility and the remote client mechanism, and I need to test some of its features (such as the floating point byte swapping code). Also, some old mechanisms are broken and need to be fixed: SUNLWP for one, and the interface to the old Suntools library. Before our Beta release we'll need to check this, HPUX V7.0, etc., MACH, and so forth. With bypass mode enabled we are still testing our protocols, and they now seem solid. But, there are still bugs at the fringes, i.e. when groups change membership rapidly or several do so at once. These all have to be 100% solid before we unleash general users on the system. Mark Wood will post something about the next Meta release sometime in the next few weeks. This should be timed to match the ISIS release cycle, but the really exciting version of Meta (with the imbedded sensor language) is still a few months away, minimum. (Fall seems like a safer bet.) As for documentation, we have updated the online manual pages and are still working on the revisions to the manual. My guess is that we are still roughly on target for a mid-March beta release and a general release about six weeks later. We'll ask for beta sites when we get to that stage; these should all be "hardened ISIS users" who know the system pretty well. The bottom line though is that if you are waiting for V2.0 before you start working with ISIS, you would be better off starting on V1.3.1 and switching later. Ken Birman