MPU Meeting 17th July 2006

Prelink

Our work for this has been completed (but has been partially undone by a temporary FC3 packages/releases problem - see below). RAT now has to add exceptions and rebuild packages for the other software affected by this problem.

LCFG distribution

Stephen and Paul will talk about this on Thursday at 4pm.

FC5 DIY DICE

Chris had an initial go at this. DNS isn't working, apparently because of a failed LDAP lookup at startup. Stephen and Chris will look at this then report the problem to George. (ACTION: Stephen and Chris).

Disk partition install crashes

Every time Chris has installed FC5 the install process has failed when it's had to radically change the disk partitioning, or at least when it's been required to delete existing partitions to make way for the ones specified in the profile. Paul hasn't seen this and Stephen has seen it occasionally. Chris will ask Lindsey and Richard (who have now done lots of FC5 upgrades) what their experience has been and then tell Alastair. (ACTION: Chris)

Toby's Mac patches

Stephen will set CFLAGS=-Wall and he'll talk to Toby. (ACTION: Stephen)

Hierarchical LCFG status pages

Paul is going to make it possible to specify in the URL whether you want the dynamic or the old-fashioned status page. (ACTION: Paul). In addition, Kenny MacDonald needs to make the hierarchical status page code create an empty table for each category. Once this has all been done, Chris will propose a hierarchy for the status page divisions (ACTION: Chris).

Achilles disk space / logserver

Logserver was upgraded but was downgraded again by the release problem (see below). Chris and Stephen both mentioned the large achilles LDAP log files problem to Toby last week. Chris will talk to Toby again about gzipping logs, possibly reducing what's logged, and possibly also moving this LDAP function off achilles if appropriate (ACTION: Chris).

New Logserver

Simon has had a lot of ideas for a new logserver - or more properly an info server. Stephen will at some point develop these ideas further with Simon. The main idea seems to be that data will be fed to a central hub which will handle HTML displaying and authorisation. This could also provide us with a handy backup service for selected important log files, for instance to help in cases of fault or intrusion detection. (ACTION ("at some point") Stephen)

Documentation

We'd like MPU procedures to be documented, to make it possible for different members of the unit to step in to the breach when necessary and carry out essential procedures. Release management is an obvious case in point, but other common procedures should be included too. The thought was triggered by Stephen's updating of the FC5 updates packages. We should all be able to do things like this when necessary. We'll talk about this next time. (ACTION: all).

The Packages/Releases Problem

Stephen noticed over the weekend that most FC3 machines, although using the default release, were using stable package lists. This could be demonstrated with e.g. qxpack -v xemacs. Chris also had a look and found some FC3 machines using default packages and some using stable packages.

Similarly, George had a problem late last week: a machine set to release testing in an include file but with an override in the machine's LCFG source setting the release to develop, was reporting that it was using the develop release but was doing packages á la the testing release.

When we looked we found that most FC3 machines had reverted to using the default release, including machines which had definitely been using the stable release at the weekend.

We worked out that this would be consistent with the mkxprof behaviour of not totally rebuilding all its dependencies in certain circumstances. However the dependencies do get rebuilt the next time the profile is rebuilt. Stephen rebuilt most FC3 profiles after having noticed the problem, which is when they must have reverted to the default release.

We agreed to set profile.release explicitly on all FC3 machines to develop. This would make the behaviour more obvious (people can now get a meaningful answer from qxprof profile.release) and would have the handy side-effect of rebuilding all FC3 profiles, sorting the FC3 dependencies problems. (ACTION: Chris).

We also agreed to clear all possible problems like this more thoroughly by doing a complete rebuild with cache delete later today. (ACTION: Chris).

Actions For Other Units

RAT

Identify all packages likely to have been affected by the prelink problem reported in RT 23434. Add entries to the prelink exceptions list for all files added by these packages' RPMs. Rebuild and reinstall the packages.

Kenny MacDonald

Make the hierarchical status page code create an empty table for each category.

-- ChrisCooke - 17 Jul 2006