MPU Meeting Tuesday 7th October 2008

Buildtools Project

At Alastair's request Stephen has added a cmake function to install templates in a particular location.

Other than that, Stephen has altered and submitted more components.

Chris commented on http://www.lcfg.org/doc/buildtools/reltool.html - he agreed with Stephen's comments on the release command and suggested that Stephen should seize this opportunity to improve the terminology by renaming the command to micro, perhaps adding a replacement release command which spits out a message directing the user to the micro command.

Power Management Project

The component now identifies the next due cron job and sets the machine's wake-up time to slightly before this job's date/time.

Chris has talked to Iain about Sleep/Condor integration and it seems that it'll be pretty simple - the machine will just have to

• stay up for a few minutes at a time before going back to sleep - as Condor clients check with the pool master every 2-3 minutes.
• wake up say every three hours, to give Condor the chance to grab any suitable waiting jobs.
• Check for the presence of a Condor job as one of the checks to be made when assessing whether sleep is currently a good idea.

Stephen and Alastair suggested broadening this latter check to provide some sort of general hook mechanism so that users at different sites could add their own tests for sleep.

LCFG Component Testing Project

The proposal is two thirds written and Stephen is waiting patiently for comments from MPU.

Project Prioritisation

We'll hold a special meeting to discuss this in Alastair's office at 10am on Thursday.

Operational

DIY DICE Docs

Alastair has created an entry for it in http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/systems/ - this links to a wiki page which gathers together all of the documentation. The install guide is now up to date and the process is far simpler than it used to be. There's still more tidying up to do in the documentation.

New Inventory

the next stage, sometime this week, will be for Stephen to change all inv entries in LCFG source files to use mutation macros. At a later stage these settings will be eliminated altogether and the inventory data will come from the inventory database. This may happen in perhaps a couple of weeks. Eventually the only inventory item that the CSOs will need to set (in the database) will be the machine's allocation - everything else will be automatically derived. In particular the location data will come from network data. However this raises questions so Alastair will talk to Ken about:

• Making sure that everyone will know in good time how to use the inventory database
• The difference between where the machine is and where the machine should be, and the apparent worrying shift in meaning of our inventory location data from the latter to the former.

qxpack

Stephen has implemented Kenny's requested change (that qxpack should exit with a non-zero code when a match is not found for a package name).

Mutation bug fix

Stephen has fixed a bug in mEXTRA and mAPPEND which made them obliterate any previous values in mutated resources when those previous values evaluated to false. The fix will go in on Friday morning but will cause a big rebuild.

Flickery screens

After some discussion, Chris will try removing xfree's vberestore settings on his and Carol's machines gothenburg and ardoch to see if that solves the flickery screen problem (where an unusable white flickering sometimes appears instead of the GDM login screen - been happening for a couple of weeks now).

This Week

Alastair will:

• Look at MPU project list
• Update the DIY DICE docs
• Order R805s
• Update to the latest lcfg-network package
• Comment on the Component Testing Project draft proposal

Chris will:

• Look at MPU project list
• Power management project
• bugzilla upgrade
• RT support
• Try a fix for the flickery screen problem
• Look at buildtools docs
• Comment on the Component Testing Project draft proposal
• MPU RT Duty
• Document the LCFG package lists

Stephen will:

• Look at MPU project list
• Finish project proposal
• Inventory and sysinfo work
• Submit more rebuilt packages
• Look at GDM welcome message

-- ChrisCooke - 7 Oct 2008