MPU Meeting Tuesday 1st December 2009

Power Management Project

Nothing happened. This is lined up for sign-off at the next Development Meeting.

rpmsubmit

Nothing happened. This is lined up for sign-off at the next Development Meeting.

AFS Component

Rhe openafs nagios translator has been rewritten so that all services on the DB servers are now monitored. He has also added support for checking a different IP address than that associated with the physical host when NetInfo is set.

Most of the issues raised from Simon's review of the openafs component have been fixed. A couple of items will have to be considered for future enhancement work, these include: support for fs newcell, which is not currently supported by the Perl AFS module and support for restarting services if NetInfo or NetRestrict change.

There is now a working test AFS cell - bigfan.inf.ed.ac.uk - which has 3 DB servers (bigfan, blurt and fenrir) and a file server on bottle which has been used to verify that the component works as required.

Documentation needs finishing. Also the transition of the first DB server to new hardware has to be planned, hopefully this can be done before Christmas. If all goes well the other two DB servers will be done in January.

TIBs

Stephen reviewed the lcfg-tibs code and worked out why it was getting bitten by the stoptibs script. Chris will have to rename the lcfg-tibs component to something like lcfg-tibsconf to workaround the stoptibs script using kill on all running processes named "tibs".

This project is coming to a close, Chris will put together a proposal for future enhancement work.

LCFG Server Refactoring

Nearly all the macros have been removed from the Perl code and replaced with variables in a new Perl module (LCFG::Server::Config).

Pandemic Planning

• Stephen still needs to write up some notes on the PXE service.

Miscellaneous Development

LCFG server dependencies

This will be added to the "wee projects" list for consideration at a later date.

Time Monitoring

We all considered what new buckets could be used to split up the "operational" bucket which currently accounts for so much of our effort. The suggestions were:

• Weekly releases ( and any associated problems )
• OS and kernel updates
• Managing LCFG and Package Servers
• Support for new hardware
• RT and providing help

The "Miscellaneous Development" bucket description will be changed to also include bug fixes.

It was agreed that we would drop the "user request" and building buckets as they accounted for pretty much nothing in the last quarter. We will start counting separately the time spent on weekly release and the OS/kernel updates.

Operational

F12

Alastair has verified that the 91resolution tool is not necessary for widescreen monitors and intel graphics cards when using Fedora 12. He also verified that the DisplayPort is now supported.

updaterpms

The new version of updaterpms which has support for removing packages with broken scripts has been rolled out to all DICE machines.

updaterpms

Alastair used some patches from Simon to update updaterpms so that it can run on F12.

ISS RT patch

Stephen started looking at the templates patch for the ISS RT system but he was a bit stuck as there isn't an obvious RT server for testing changes. It was suggested that he should ask Marije if he can borrow the forumtracker RT system for a while now it is not used as heavily.

Perl course

Chris went on the UKUUG Intermediate Perl course, he has written a blog post on the subject.

This Week

Alastair will:

• Discuss the repository change with Kenny
• Discuss the disk space for VMs with Craig
• Finish configuring ashkenazy

Chris will:

• TiBS
• New servers at KB
• Hardware project proposal
• Write up ashkenazy tests

Stephen will:

• Finish documenting openafs component
• PXE documentation
• om changes
• ISS RT
• LCFG Tutorial

-- StephenQuinney - 02 Dec 2009