MPU Meeting Tuesday 14th April 2009

Buildtools Project

The project is officially finished! Congratulations to Stephen.

Power Management Project

A ghastly bug in SL5.3 has come to light whereby machines whose monitors are connected with a VGA cable rather than a DVI cable can hang completely when going into or out of X. There's more about this on the sleep component wiki page.

The Redhat bug report luckily comes with a patch; Stephen will try applying this this week and rolling out a new i810 driver package (which incorporates the intel driver as well as the i810 one).

Once this is done Chris will be able to redo the hardware testing to check that all is well. He'll test an Nvidia-equipped machine too. It's expected that the Nvidia suspend support will be good.

Following the hardware testing the component will be added to the develop release, since there wasn't a big response to the call for volunteers.

RPMsubmit Project

No recent developments.

AFS Component

The client support is pretty much all done.

There's a problem with the Perl AFS module: it only works on 32 bit! It doesn't even build on 64 bit. Some of the assumptions underlying its fancy manipulation of libraries are not valid for 64 bit. For our servers this shouldn't be a problem as AFS servers have to be 32 bit anyway. However it'll be a problem with our clients. Simon suggests that we write a perl wrapper which implements the calls we'll need using ioctls. This is possible on Linux (only) but that's good enough for us.

TiBS Component

Chris has started with the assumption that we want the component to turn a blank machine into the TiBS server. TiBS is installed with a tangle of shell scripts which assume interactive use - for example expecting the user to type "I agree" when shown the terms of the licence agreement.

The suggestion for how to progress is to do a basic job of automating the installation - giving the install process a functional set of responses without making them flexible and configurable - then having the component concentrate on configuring those aspects of TiBS which need to be changed often rather than just once.

TiBS is meant to be able to back up laptops too. Does it in fact do this? Chris will investigate.

Miscellaneous Development

SL5.3

It has a serious bug, described above in the Power Management Project section. George has also found a couple of problems to do with USB support and bash startup scripts.

Operational

SL5 kernel

There is another new SL5 kernel, we need to build our locally patched version and get it tested.

OpenAFS

There was an important security update last week. It's on all clients. Servers need to be rebooted if they haven't already been.

Mutation macro mistake

There was a nasty bug in each of mADD, mREPLACE and MREMOVE whereby the word boundary was sometimes being put in the wrong place. Stephen has reimplemented them and the fixed version is on the LCFG test server.

Dual path fibre channel

it looks like our only server which doesn't but could have this is dresden - Chris will add it.

This Week

Chris will:

• Review mini-projects for next week.
• Review personal development topics for next week.
• Test suspend/resume and configure the sleep component appropriately
• Carry on with TiBS
• Setup dual path fibre channel on dresden

Alastair will:

• Review mini-projects for next week.
• Review personal development topics for next week.
• Write some virtual machine migration instructions
• Do the testing and stable releases for the next couple of weeks
• Unstall rpmsubmit project
• Move the central disk blob from satabeast to new EVO array (just centaur to do)
• Fix the roaming documentation

Stephen will:

• Review mini-projects for next week.
• Review personal development topics for next week.
• Build a patched i810 package
• SL5.3 testing
• New SL5 kernel
• AFS component
• Add sleep component to his machines

-- ChrisCooke - 15 Apr 2009