MPU Meeting Monday 26th May 2008

Buildtools Project

Koji is almost working on telford. The plan is for it to manage all the mock queues. There will be lots of queues as we'll have queues for each combination of architecture and localisation layer. The extent to which Koji was intended for this job is not obvious. Neither is Koji's setup; it seems to require a great many packages, so many that extra disk space will be required unless the packages turn out not to be necessary after all.

Power management project

The implementation project was approved by the development meeting, and the investigative project was signed off.

Operational

Mac headers

Chris thought he'd fully deployed the new Mac headers but in fact he'd been searching profiles wrongly: Alastair turned up another lot of profiles which also need at least one new Mac header applying to them to tidy them up. Chris will go back and try again.

saveprof

Both LCFG servers filled their disks last week. The space was consumed by the nightly saveprof sets, which average around 90MB per night. Chris had meant to move the saveprof data to a scratch disk on the servers' spare disk space but had forgotten. Stephen did the necessary and got the servers back into working order. Two points arise:

• The scratch partitions are also going to fill up in a few months' time. Paul needs to identify another site for longer term storage.
• When the disk filled, newly generated XML profiles were simply written to disk in a truncated form. We're uncomfortable with this and think that the server should do some sort of integrity check on the written-out profile, for instance using a checksum.

5.2

Redhat Enterprise 5.2 is out (press release, release notes) so SL 5.2 should be out in the next couple of weeks. The main difference seems to be to desktop software, with for instance Firefox going to a beta release of version 3.

Wire headers

Stephen and Ian have been working on how to get machines working without the need for individual profile edits after the move to the forum.

AT power

The AT power-down will be on Tuesday. Of our servers there:

• mousa is on the UPS.
• boreas is not on the UPS. Stephen will move it to the UPS before the power-down.
• bressay is not on the UPS. Chris will turn it off on Monday.

RPM Cache servers

Stephen is moving machines to using a new round-robin alias for the RPM cache servers, cache.rpms. The alias seems always to resolve to the closer server, which is useful. He'll keep the old wire-based aliases around for a couple of months to cater for laggardly machines with elderly profiles.

Time figures

please bring them up to date.

SL5 TCP problem

this has probably been fixed in one of the two recent kernel updates, but Stephen will check.

This Week

Alastair will:

• buy VMware ESX licences.
• work on & in the new building.

Chris will:

• look at xinetd component
• get Mac profiles tidied

Stephen will:

• work on buildtools project
• look at RHEL5.2
• look at RHEL5.2 kernel

-- ChrisCooke - 27 May 2008