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.

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.