FTS Monitoring RPMS

Have now started a concerted effort to package each of the FTS scripts that are lying around as FtsAddons. One is done now, one of Ron's scripts. Now started on Poalos scripts and by chance there was some interest in this from Taiwan's T1 so looks like I have a tester that is always good. Other than that I seem to be dashing between French and the Hospital for a dodgy thumb that I have. Took the minutes for the EMT as well. This is easily the best meeting to understand what is going in the upcoming software.

COD's Mercy

I've been CIC-on-Duty this week, lots of problems caused by poorly tested tests such as R-GMA not being on port 8443 at many sites. The good thing though it has given the procedure for new tests a wake up call and hopefully next time it will go better. This is good since the next test may well be the posix test of mine. End of the week has been difficult though, a scheduled GGUS intervention followed by an unscheduled SAM outage and now the GOCDB has fallen over. Of course these three events all happened on consecutive days.

Using GCalDeamon Now

I used to publish my Apple iCal calendars to a webdav and from there import them is ical format to gcal. I've now configured GCalDaemon to do a two way sync between ical and gcal. Previously I could not update gcal version of my calendar. This is a lot better since I need to work in gcal anyway to update Jenny's calendar. So far it looks to be working perfectly.

Ubuntu on my Mac

Installed VitualBox on my Mac today followed by Ubuntu. Looks to be much the same as Parallels but it is free to use in binary form for personal use and the underlying code is even opensource so that is good. So far it seems to be working. The reality though is I have not missed linux on my laptop since getting a mac.

I built an RPM

Building an RPM would not normally be exciting but this was out of the EGEE CVS using ETICS to build and publish an RPM. The RPM is in reality about as simple as it gets and contains basically a cron, some scripts and logrotate to do some monitoring of the FTS. I still have some unanswered questions, for instance I'm currently unable to tag a version nor do I know how to generate a nightly build of particular ETICS tag. For now this is fine and allows Andrey to proceed with doing the rest.

ETICS Progress

Made some progress today with ETICS and actually have it making a package. However did not manage to do it with out getting expert help in from someone who is far to busy to help my small problems. Turned out I was using an old client, referenced on twiki page all be not an official ETICS page and there was a bit of the web interface I could click that I did not realise I could click.

Eradicating the Hand of the Developer

After what was meant to be an easy addition to the FTS today of another webserver turns out there was yet another file that has been added to make it work by the developers. It's a classic problem of course. I guess one day that layer of access should be closed down. Hopefully with the upcoming upgrade to the FTS there will be time to wipe the service and start again. The only sure way to check what you think quattor is going to do actually happens at install time and you end up with a working service.

BES, DRMAA and Torque

Started to look at an OGF standard today BES. Looks to be some standard interface to batch systems that various bits of EGEE will support including cream. However I thought that DRMAA was a similar thing from OGF to give a method for how to interact with batch systems. Need to find out more about both to understand how they are distinct.

Pilot FTS to PPS FTS

Looked yesterday at the changes that would be applied to the FTS pilot if it was brought in line with the PPS deployment of the FTS. In principal they are the same but the pilot has pre-release versions of the RPMs. In reality it looks like just about every RPM will get an upgrade so hopefully we will end up with the same thing that works the same or at least as well as the pilot. This will definetley be done before the production FTSes get the upgrade.

ETICS Virgin

Made a first serious attempt today to add a component into ETICS. In terms of software to be added it is very trivial. Just some scripts to be run as a cron to generate some web reports from the FTS. So after reading through quite few python stack traces it turns out I only have read access to the bits of ETICS I needed to operate on. Have requested more access now.

Quattor and RPMS

Spent all most the whole day writing quattor configuration files for the upcoming FTS release. Very painful, it is basically equivalent to writing an rpm database by hand via trial an error. One of those tasks that in hindsight it would have been easier to write a script but anyway....

Java and Jpackage

Wrote a page describing howto install JPackage versions of JDK on Scientific Linux. It is lot easier to use the JPackage ones rather than the SUN supplied ones but requires a change in practice probably for many sites who were already doing something else.

RPM cleanup on FTS Servers

Not very interesting but fixed up the local CERN FTS hacks to comply to the new yaim and ncm-yaim that have been applied across all services at CERN. Also the split in the SetToDesiredState packages has been accommodated. In the process I noticed that the SRM and castorgrid hosts were broken due to this so alerted the relevant people to correct the situation. Also asked about how and when the SetToDesiredState was useful which I now understand. This had been something I had not understood since learning of its existence shortly after arriving at CERN...

Jpackage and Tomcat

There were some reports from the EMT that installing tomcat5 from jpackage with SUN's JDK 1.5 is a little problematic. Had a look at it today and now I understand it all though how to proceed is unclear. In short tomcat5 requires xml-commons-jaxp-1.3-apis which obsoletes xml-commons-apis. This property is however is provided by SUN's JDK 1.5 and so installing the xml-common api has the result of removing SUN's JDK! Submitted a bug to jpackage and provided a recipe of installation order that works. Bug 266.

FTS Monitoring Spider

Another meeting about monitoring the FTS and how to create summary of tables of transfers by categorized errors and alike. In fact the stuff already done on the FTS spider looks good. It just needs to be brought closer to the main development and do more in Oracle rather than in PHP.

Voms2gacl Utility Written.

I've written a short script as an adventure for me python. voms2gacl downloads the xml formatted member of a VOMS server and creates .gacl for use by mod_gridsite. In short it is an easy way to restrict access to webpages by VO for web-browsers. voms2gacl. In fact I wrote it a while ago but I realised I never posted it.

Photos from HEPiX

Following the HEPiX meeting last week I took some photos of the event but mainly the after hours events. HEPiX Photos

GMOD, ROC and Meetings.

This week I'm both the GMOD and the CERN ROC which basically results in lots of meetings. The GDB was today as well but I was unable to attend much of it due to other meetings. In the EMT meeting I was surprised that moving to jpackage looks to be non-trivial. The most basic thing of using Java 1.5 and tomcat looks to not be obvious but I think with the correct combination of magic it should work.

French Classes Restart

French classes restarted on Monday. They are now on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings. So far so good and this time I really want to put some work into get the most out of them. Face it I am never going to get a better chance to learn a language than I do now.

Two HEPiX Talks Archived

I gave two talks at the DESY HEPiX meeting both of which are now archived for prosperity.

• DPM Update.
  


• SRM update.
  

For both you need real player installed to view them. If I could work out how to convert them to avi or mpeg I would.