Torque Maui Builds from ETICS.

Finally got around to pushing maui and torque through ETICS. Bang up to date releases for sl3 and sl4 with i386 or X86_64 are all available. Others like SL5 should now be trivial. The torque build was fairly straight forward where as the maui build does some black magic for the torque dependency it needs. Recently there have been many requests for the X86_64 builds and it is needed anyway for the upcoming official gLite X86_64 WN which is around the corner now. Also the Dubliners have been wanting it for ages to build other exotic platforms like MacOS. Releases, CVS Repos. To finish this off I need to close down some of pages hosted at RAL and GridPP with pointers to the new locations. Not bad for a day when I got my notice of contract termination.

Back to School.

After a two week break without a single keystroke pressed I've been back for my first day. Big outstanding items are starting a TCG inspired group to investigate and conclude on finding and utilizing individual worker node resources. My first thoughts is that it is all done but there are massive gaps in flexibility of configuration or deployment to achieve it..., it is not done in other words. Other than this the FTM node I've been trying to deploy was rejected from certification for a lack of timestamps in it's logfiles. This is fair enough, I thought it at the time but ignored the problem. Finally the SL4 FTS must be installed, the compilation is there but who knows if it works.

SAM test CE-sft-posix now running.

After deployment mistakes and corrections the CE-sft-posix test is now running again. The significant change is that now new SEs that appear pass for the first two weeks. Previously they were guaranteed to fail for the first two weeks. The results look promising in that out of 287 CEs tested today 69 or so look to fail. This includes the 10 or so CERN CEs where there may be a problem with the configuration of the atlas-durable and lhcb-durable SRMs but perhaps only with respect to the OPS vo which is probably not well tested. Next step will be to get CERN passing. Need to have my own house in order before proceeding. Following that go through the other failiures to look if they seem fair.

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.