Learning Oracle

This week I was on the Oracle Administrators Course I and II. Apparently because we are CERN and bright young things they compressed the two week course into a one week course. At first it might not be obvious that the course would be directly related what I do day-to-day but I now certainly understand better what the DBAs are doing near by that the FTS uses. In the past they have been easily able to baffle me with the science of blocks, fragmentation, performance tuning, ... The course was given by Lutz Hartmann, a so called Oracle ACE no less. He was genuinely enthusiastic to teach us and it was all pretty effective. I learned as much as I possibly could in one week so am pleased. I now have one year to do my exams to get the Oracle Administrator qualification. It has to be useful for a post CERN life apart from anything else.

Dependents

This month and either side is the much touted as the gLite restructuring exercise. The aim is chuck out old code and clean up some of what is there especially looking at dependencies and alike. A review basically. Seems I have been given the LFC and DPM to review which is good, I think they should be fairly obvious. The lack of java makes them easier compared to what it could be. There was some suggestions that the dependencies could be determined from the ETICS system, it is good that the final RPM result is now being used. It is this the final product after all which aim to clean up.

Cardinal Sin of Grid Operations

CERN today committed the cardinal sin of grid operations. They allowed a host certificate to expire for a production service. This took the MyProxy service used by the FTS out for almost 24 hours. The service is a victim of its own success because it had been running itself for the last year without interruption but when it came to it fell between the cracks of responsibility. I've every confidence it will never happen again. At least with this service anyway.

FTM Node is Getting There

The new named FTM (File Transfer Monitoring) node made reached a significant point today. All the packages are done including the GridView publishing ones. Also the yaim configuration is done within the new glite-fts-yaim module. But there seems to be some dependecy problem which is best resolved by just avoiding the problem and moving to SL4. This will be a pain since in the first instance the FTM monitoring will require a different OS to the FTS itself. The dependecies may be able to improved furthur as well. Currently VDT is needed just to provide an openldap client to the BDII plugin within the glite-sd-query tool. Hopefully this can be removed. I'm sure it does not need to be there.

OS Matching

I've now published a recipe for matching RHEL3 , RHEL4 OS clones. It's a lot more complicated that it should be and no doubt there will be grumbling but I am happy it is correct.