Tutorials at LCG Workshop

I have been given the task of chairing and planning the tutorial portion for the LCG workshop in January at CERN. In fact this looks to be good thing to do, there are several good ideas and plans that have been given to me or I can think off. There are even some volunteers to give presentations which is just great.

CDB is Way Too Slow

Spent about 30 minutes today putting in an update to CDB. It failed which is fine but it took over an hour to find out. Need to find out what can be done to waste less time when I make trivial mistakes.

Install of glite-LB Progressing

The attempt to install a quattorized version of the glite-LB looks to have gone well. Certainly all the packages are now installed and just the configuration needs to be looked at. The box needs some kind of raid as well. RAID is something I seriously don't know how to do in quatttor. but like everything else though just find an example and steal it.

IT-GD-OPS Section Meeting

Attended the section meeting to report what I've been up to the last week:

• Maui update following the bug that needed fixing.
• FTS servers , pilot service reinstalled from scratch and is at least running.
• Installing glite-LB with Yvan. Requires some new templates.
• Both the last points require an update to ncm-yaim which I'm trying to get AFS permission for.
  
• SDU-LCG2 asking to be certified.
  

Other points of interest raised at the meeting:

• R-GMA broken on the PPS which is broken anyway due to IP renumbering.
• Description of xmas time work which I can't do this year, basically time in lieu though
• Interesting points form Alistair about user's expectation of quality. Do we need a new set of users who are more tolerant for grid over batch.
• A couple of fixes have been put into SAM to try and clean up results.
• Five countries in Mediterranean grid, just tested 4.6 Million drugs against Malaria !!
• Re installation form scratch is it still needed? Yes it should be done on the PPS.
  

NCM-YAIM blocking glite-LB.

So it turns out that I can't install the glite-LB as requested since the ncm-yaim component does not support the new glite-LB method to YAIM. I need to understand why ncm-yaim is so explicit about all these things in the code. I think in quattor there is someway that a list of approved values can be stored in the templates. But for now blocked on this till I get write access to the ncm-yaim area.

Tout Directions

For French today I directed myself around a map of Nantes I think it was and had to describe other people in the room with the limited set of adjectives I have - quite embarrassing.

Standalone Loging and Bookeeping Server

Was asked to help deploy a gLite WMS with out the WMS, basically a stand alone logging and book keeping service. In principal easy but removing packages is always harder than adding them. I think what is needed after discussion is a new sub cluster, an lb, to the glitewms. This should work well but the generic glitewms needs to become a sub-cluster as well really. More generally its seems that CDB profiles and clusters are well defined but the use of sub-clusters seems quite ill defined to me at the moment. FTS and the RBs use a completely different layout even within themselves. One that needs rationalizing I think.