NCM-YAIM and ORACLE_LOCATION

It turns out that many of the non service specific values in a YAIM site-info.def file are hard coded into the NCM-YAIM component. There are I guess some good reasons for doing this but it makes adding a new one quite a painful process. Anyway a good opportunity to try and update and release a YAIM component to CERN. Luckily as always there are ways around it and I can continue with the test installs. All five nodes installing now hoping for working system this time....

New Cluster for FTS

A new cluster for the production FTS service is beginning to become available to me. So far one box is ready for the new Quattor->NCM->YAIM installation with a bit of SINDES thrown in for good luck. Unfortunately some ORACLE_LOCATION values appeared to be very illusive to track down. Should be well on the way for the new hardware tomorrow.

Cluster Installations

Today was the first day installing a cluster of 5 nodes with an aim to end up with a working FTS service on the five nodes. I don't expect it for a second to work first time but anyway. Concerning how the SSH keys make their way to the SINDES server I found an answer - they are not uploaded to SINDES. This is something useful I could add to PrepareInstall. No doubt if it were there people would use it. There was meant to be a new cluster of nodes arriving yesterday for me to install, no sign of it yet.

Learning AIMS

AIMS is some magical system at CERN for maintaining kickstart, DHCP and PXE options via a command interface. Much like RALs swing device. aims is of course more complicated and a lot more magical in how it works. Seems to rely a lot of having AFS access to various directories and it is taking to time to find out the hard way to what I need access to.

Certifying SDU

Trying to help SDU to rejoin the EGEE grid. From the questions today this looks like it could take a long time. "How do we add a new hard disk to an SE?"