MPU Meeting Wednesday 23rd April 2008

Buildtools Project

The mock work is done. The new mock component sets up chroots and configures mock. This turned up a problem which needs further investigation: mock needs yum repository metadata on pezenas. Squid isn't handling the redirects properly for this metadata: it doesn't notice when the metadata has changed. The system works when using the master directly, but not via the squid proxy. One suggestion is to use an apache module to tell squid not to cache yum XML files.

Power management project

We didn't have time to discuss the findings and plan what happens next; we will do this at the next meeting.

Operational

MacOSX headers

We now have suitable hw model files for our Macs. At present these merely fill in the inv.model field. Toby has made lcfg and inf level headers for Leopard (osx5.h) and Tiger (osx4.h). The DICE defaults will need some work before these headers can go to dice level. Until then we'll use the inf level ones and Chris will ask Toby to put them into use on his (partially) LCFG-managed Macs. Meanwhile Chris will ask Carolto use the new hw model headers and self-managed.h for the self-managed Macs.

DNUK

CSTR has a twin of the stricken kairos called aristo. Stephen has spoken to Roger and it seems that the major jobs running on aristo are fully checkpointed (hooray!) meaning that the machine can be shut down for a couple of hours so that Stephen can take a look at it and run some tests. This testing will be done on Monday afternoon following the MPU meeting.

LCFG packages in world

All have now been moved to lcfg, and the wording of the bucket advice has been tightened up.

SL5 performance problems

A problem at the TCP level underlies reports that SSH file transfer performance through the newly SL5ed SSH server is dreadful, and that SL5-hosted NFS servers are collapsing (which is bad news for the mirror servers). There's a new SL5 kernel which may not fix the problem but the services unit will test it just in case it does. Failing that there's a patch which does fix the problem but on 2.6.24; Stephen will examine this in case it may be applicable to our kernel. We'll also keep a look out for a REL kernel fix for the problem.

Bugzilla

The services unit has understandably not had spare effort available for updating bugzilla, but the LCFG core refactoring project is going to need an updated version. Alastair will talk to Craig about possibly offering effort for this.

Defaults files

Chris has found a couple of defaults files which don't even show up in the server dependencies. Stephen says not to worry, this does mean simply that they're not used. Alastair discovered that neither component (events and webdav) was built even for fc5. Chris will mail COs then eject the defaults files from the package list.

Next Meeting

The next MPU meeting will be on Monday 28th April at 2pm.

This Week

Alastair will:

• DIY DICE documentation
• Fix DIY DICE install issues
• Look at kairos

Chris will:

• RT Duty
• Talk to Carol about self-managed Mac profiles
• Talk to Toby about LCFG-managed Mac profiles
• Chase auto-built packages
• Look at xinetd component
• Write up the PersonalComputingMeeting

Stephen will:

• Work on buildtools project
• investigate the SL5 TCP problem

-- ChrisCooke - 23 Apr 2008