MPU Meeting Tuesday 8th December 2009

Power Management Project

This project has been signed off by the Development Meeting.

rpmsubmit

This project has been signed off by the Development Meeting.

Alastair will make a service catalogue entry for the package submission service.

Alastair will speak to Simon about which server would be best for refreshpkgs.

AFS Component

Not a lot happened this week. Things are progressing through into the stable release.

The transition for the first AFS database server will happen on Monday at 8am. The transition plan has been written in detail and has been examined by Simon, George, Craig and Toby. Stephen will warn users that a third of them will see a one minute hang.

The documentation is mostly finished - headers and how to get started with a new site are now both complete.

The component is now in the develop release. Stephen will put it into testing only when the AFS database servers have been done.

TiBS

Chris has duplicated the "tibs" component and all of its associated headers with new "tibsconf" ones. On Friday he hopes to switch the TiBS server alexandria over to "tibsconf".

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

LCFG components should really run in their own process namespace - we could for instance add "lcfg-" to the names of component processes. Stephen will submit a bug to that effect.

LCFG Server Refactoring

Nothing happened this week.

Server Hardware

• The project has been started (devproj 134).
• Chris has been looking at the various RAID controllers in use; Alastair suggests starting at the newest and working backwards.
• Memory problems and AC power problems can be discovered using ipmitool sel list or similar.
• An ipmi based approach should give us something that's applicable across manufacturers.

LCFG Tutorial

Stephen has finished writing the components section. The tutorial will have written notes to be handed out to attendees. These will be usable later as a web-based tutorial on lcfg.org. The examples will be of real world components.

Pandemic Planning

Stephen has documented the PXE service.

Miscellaneous Development

"om" changes

The new code should now be on all machines. The resources have not yet changed - Stephen will do that in the New Year. The new setup has been tested and seems to work. Stephen will enable it for the "develop" release this week.

ISS RT

Stephen has packaged up the templates patch and tested it out on the forumtracker: it seems to work. He'll leave it for Tim to install as it'll need to be configured correctly on first installation and Tim will know who needs to be able to do what.

Wee Projects Suggestions

Stephen will add these to the Wee Projects list:

Nagios monitoring for disk space

This could be done as a passive check; Stephen would like to have a go at it. Alastair suggests having a word with Ian first.

Nagios monitoring of TFTP

TFTP is run from xinetd and xinetd sometimes needs a kick to get it going again. Nagios monitoring could be handy not just for our PXE service but also for RAT's brain brick server and Infrastructure's router upgrades.

Update LCFG web site

It currently links to CVS but not subversion. It should try to link first to subversion then failing that to CVS.

Operational

Web access to SRPMS

Stephen has fixed the LCFG web site so that source RPMs can be accessed once again. He's done this the easy way for now: making the old URL work again. The more complete way would be to add more apache config to make the SRPMs appear in a structure akin to the new repository structure. Alastair will do this.

ashkenazy on testing release

Alastair has done this He has also reviewed his inf level testing suggestions and found them to be complete. Chris has written them up as release tests 6, 7 and 8.

VM servers equipment

Alastair and Craig have discussed the getting of faster disks and other new equipment for the VM servers. Unfortunately it looks as if we'll have to retender. This won't be done immediately.

New VMware server

Chris will install metropolitan, the Forum's third production VMware server. It should use space on the other Evo array.

New KB servers

Chris will install two more VMware servers at KB: piccadilly will be a production VMware server and northern will be a hot spare VMware server.

Pre-populate Bugzilla for RHEL 6

Chris should consider how to automatically make the action bug tree for the RHEL6 port - or create the bugs by hand! The Bugzilla scripting interface should help - there are several Perl modules available. Looking at the SL5 upgrade tree should also help. Some tool which turns a config file of some sort into a lot of bugs would be desirable. Another tip: look in subversion to see what needs porting.

Subversion Permission for Kenny

It would be convenient if we could give Kenny MacDonald permission to create new projects in the subversion repository for people, and edit repository permissions. We think that's fine as long as he mails mp-unit when he does so.

This Week

Alastair will:

• Discuss the repository change with Kenny
• Discuss the disk space for VMs with Craig
• Ask Simon which server would be best for =refreshpkgs=
• Fix access to SRPMs on LCFG website
• Add service catalogue entry for package submission system

Chris will:

• TiBS switchover
• Install piccadilly and northern
• Install metropolitan
• Server Hardware project

Stephen will:

• LCFG Tutorial
• AFS database server switchover.

-- ChrisCooke - 08 Dec 2009