A Good Match

A busy week this week where I collected more things to do than I completed. There were some complaints from sites that some VOs have asked them to switch of their resources when their SE is not present for whatever reason. It turns out that CMS already have a good query for finding CEs and SEs but it just needs a bit added to to not match CEs when the SE is not published. This should help sites and users a lot if something sensible can be matched. In the process discovered that there is work going on now to write a more intelligent service information provider in the UK. It looks good in principal but I must give some comments before it gets further. On a similar matching note CERN is about to go live with some SL4 resources which means people are now actually worried about matching to versions of OSes. It seems a bug reported as fixed a while back may in fact not be fixed though I need to check this fix has actually gone into latest WMS that was deployed today.

Writing a New YAIM Component

Committed and started running a new YAIM component today to configure the new FTM node. It is going to be really trivial to do the code, basically I need to edit some text files and turn some services on so I should be able to handle that. I decided to dig out ed for the purpose. It was over 10 years ago worryingly that someone first showed me ed and tried to convince me that if you wanted to edit a text file from a script it was the perfect tool. At the time it seemed far to backwards, today it does indeed seem to be the perfect tool for the job. The initial testing went okay and uncovered several bugs or improvements to be made to YAIM core which are now submitted. The new modular yaim looks like a very sensible idea. It allows me to work on the FTS part without fear of breaking or holding up the rest of the world.

RPMs not ETICS RPMs

After generating RPMS with ETICS and being generally dissatisfied with them I investigated what others are doing. It seems the order of the day is just to write your own .spec file and tell ETICS not to attempt to do so. It defeats the object of ETICS in that is meant to be package neutral but it decreases my trivial installation instructions from 10 points to just 2 since the rest is handled by a decent package. It should make the subsequent upgrades trivial as well as opposed to a complete reconfiguration from scratch. In fact ETICS is adding features all the time such as recently it now supports the %config RPM directive that is a step in the right direction to make the autogenerated spec files better.

FTS Upgrade at CERN

After careful planning the the CERN FTS servers, production T0 export, tiertwo and the pilot were all upgraded today to version 2.0. It basically went okay and much to plan with completion 10 minutes before the announced intervention period end was reached. In fact two things went wrong. The quattor wrapper for yaim was never tested with the new YAIM, the new glite-FTS2 and glite-FTA2 targets had to merged in by hand. That was my mistake. The other problem still needs investigating but basically huge fragmentation to the production database appears to have (a) made the schema update a lot slower than expected and (b) an index has become corrupted. All in all it looks like although things are working some more downtime will be needed now perhaps longer than the upgrade itself to clean the database up. All in all it makes my life a lot easier, there is now a lot less left that I am managing from before my time getting to CERN.

Nagios Sensor gather_sam Now Released

At the EGEE operations meeting a presentation form the WLCGMG described their first sensor that might be useful especially to sites running or considering to run nagios. Basically a nagios sensor that will raise the SAM alarms on your local hosts in your nagios system. They are currently looking for a few volunteer sites as early adopters.

Stockholm SA1 Meetings

This week I'm visiting Stockholm for the EGEE SA1 meetings. No doubt something interesting will happen to put here.