MPU Meeting Tuesday 3rd March 2009

Buildtools Project

Geoff Lee has contributed some more MacOS patches, and Stephen is talking to Geoff about them. MacOS installs things in /private and normal directories like /tmp may be just links into /private - however Buildtools-made packages can overwrite the links into /private with real directories, causing havoc.

Stephen has rewritten the cron component in Perl. He's kept its existing somewhat eccentric behaviour and has even kept most of the Solaris parts.

In the coming week he'll split the lcfg-utils package into three to make it more maintainable.

Power Management Project

The sleep tests code is going well; the sleep component now tests among other things a machine's load averages and logged in users' idle times.

Miscellaneous Development

Alastair has completed the virtualisation development and documentation work.

Stephen has rewritten lcfg-cron.

Carol has been testing DIY DICE under static VMware and has come up with a number of areas in which the installation instructions need to be changed to cope with VMware Fusion. She also found that the installroot wasn't accessible from the self-managed wires, so we'll need to open that up.

Operational

Packaging guidelines

Alastair had these comments to make on Chris's extension of the packaging guidelines:

• Always roll a new version, regardless of how trivial a change you make.
• The Packager tag: Fedora uses this to denote the person who most recently built the package. This person may have no role at all in the maintenance or authorship of that package. We on the other hand tend to use it to denote the package's author or maintainer, and buildtools makes that link explicitly. We should advise people of the two meanings and tell them to choose based on whether their package is expected to go upstream or not.
• What and where is our RPM naming convention?
• Note the refresh rate of our extras bucket. People spotting something in EPEL which isn't in extras should ask the MPU to refresh extras.

Decommissioning Servers

We have several machines in KB which need to be dealt with:

• bottle, split, hamnavoe and pezenas can now be moved to the Forum whenever is convenient
• mull, cherub, hootsmon and pezenas are junk
• the data on dresden needs to be rsynced to a Forum array. (Let's put it on a larger partition.) This will simplify the dresden move somewhat in that it will no longer need to move in sync with satabeast2.

bugs.lcfg.org

Chris has upgraded its Bugzilla to the latest security release, 3.0.8.

svn.lcfg.org with webdav

Stephen has switched us over to webdav.

This Week

Alastair will:

• update qlogic headers to reflect move back to stock SL5 driver
• try new kernel with FibreChannel
• unstall the RPM project
• dual path/controller with new storage arrays
• test the new kernel with bottle & Fibrechannel
• move dresden data
• move central's disk blob from satabeast to new EVO array
• modify unit projects as per project priority plan from CEG

Chris will:

• work on Desktop Power Management.
• handle RT this week (MPUrtDuty)

Stephen will:

• package up the repository maintenance scripts
• add kernel blacklist support to the hardware component
• split lcfg-utils
• open up the NFS installroot
• svn support for build tools
• handle RT next week (MPUrtDuty)

-- ChrisCooke - 5 Mar 2009