Two HEPiX Talks Archived

I gave two talks at the DESY HEPiX meeting both of which are now archived for prosperity.

• DPM Update.
  


• SRM update.
  

For both you need real player installed to view them. If I could work out how to convert them to avi or mpeg I would.

Increasing Reliability by Testing

Interesting talk about the hardware testing that CERN does both at burn in and also routinely. A lot of these things such as fsprobe, SMART, inventory and memory tests are ran routinely on the boxes I run so it is good to here a description of what they are doing.

SL3 Security Updates

Looks like SL3 will be maintained with vendor's security updates until 2010. This is good news for EGEE who are behind the previous published end of life for the release of the SL4 service nodes.

WLCG System Admin Group

A summary of the WLCG system admin group was given. Some of the things they are up to include starting a wiki to collect tips and scripts together that people are working on. e.g torque, maui and cfengine recipes. It is a general Cookbook of ideas. There is also a subversion repository and again uses gridsite like the wiki does. There are currently 9 scripts in the repository and more are needed. The need more volunteers which is exactly why publicising at events like HEPiX.

Sharepoint and TWiki

According to the CERN status report the use of Microsoft's sharepoint instead of the CERN twiki. Not something that I would ever like to see.

HEPiX Goes Green

Seems there has quite a theme of building new computer centers around the globe at HEP sites. But interesting is that many of them include the use of waste heat from the machine rooms to heat the office space.

Another XEN advantage for Batch Workers

Brookhaven presented that they were running batch jobs in XEN machines on there compute farm. The aim is that they also serve the storage space within dCache or xrootd and want to protect this storage from batch jobs that crash the machine.