Do something useful with the foo-linux clusters

[jdreed]

The following clusters exist in moira:
-alpha-linux
-beta-linux
-bleeding-linux
-early-linux
-public-linux

Currently, we only really "use" public-linux and beta-linux. We should decide if we want a cluster that pulls from -development, and we should maybe consolidate the others. This requires outreach to owners of existing machines. It's possible that anything that isn't public-linux should be moved into beta-linux.

I have a feeling bleeding-linux hasn't been used since the 9.0 days. I also can't remember the timeframe from beta -> early -> public, and am failing to find the web page with that info.

[jweiss]

IIRC the timeframe was:
4/1 -> alpha (has moderate chance of destroying your machine, mainly intended for people like alexp, and the athena release engineers who had a lot of building/testing to do)
5/1 -> beta (had a very small chance of destroying your machine, athena developers were expected to have at least one machine in this cluster)
6/1 -> early (should not destroy your machine, all IS&T staff were encouraged to have their workstation in this cluster, there were often several machines in w20 or other clusters that were in this cluster)
7/1 -> public

Over the course of this process the release usually slipped 2-4 weeks and maybe as many as 6, which put public in early to mid August which was about as late as we could tolerate, and still have time to fix issues that weren't found before the release went public.

[jdreed]

I have created a web page that attempts to describe our clusters. It is at http://debathena.mit.edu/testing, but not linked from anywhere. Feedback would be appreciated.

I will attempt to go through and clean up the existing clusters, whose membership has bitrotted. We also need to reconcile the "early" cluster with our concept of "development" and "proposed" and figure out what we should do.

See also #661.

[jweiss]

lowercase "-a" in the blanche invocation. I think documentation is also vaguely standardized on having the list be the first argument to blanche, though that isn't required by the code.

Tell people mailing hesreq to include the hostname, not hostname or IP.