(r3) MPUnitMeeting20100720 < DICE

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---++ MPU Meeting Tuesday 20th July 2010

---+++ LCFG Server Refactoring

Nothing happened.

---+++ Server Hardware

Stalled.

---+++ Installroot

Stephen noted that he had tried to use the new installer for SL5.5 but did not have any success so had to go back to using the old methods. Alastair will investigate.

---+++ F13

   $ Package Lists : All the LCFG-level package lists have now been sorted out, mostly this involved using yum to install groups of packages (e.g. gnome, kde and xfce) and adding them to the desktop list. The lists have been checked for consistency to hopefully avoid conflicts, please be careful with what you add so problems don't crop up.

   $ LDAP : All the local openldap packages were built and submitted for F13 to help Toby who is busy with work on prometheus. Currently we are running a local LDAP server on each machine but the user and group lookups are still done against an external server. Stephen will check if Toby is happy for the switch to be made to using the local server.

   $ nfs and amd : Getting the nfs client working with amd took a bit of a battle. Mostly this was because the am-utils package has been built incorrectly on F13, see [[https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=602938][#602938]] for full details. It was also necessary to add entries into hosts.allow for lockd and statd as these are now built against tcpwrappers.

   $ pam_afs_session and pam_keyinit : Stephen encountered lots of problems with AFS tokens disappearing shortly after login. After lots of head scratching it turned out this was due to pam_keyinit reinitialising the keyring just after it had been setup by pam_afs_session. Basically, we should not be using pam_keyinit. Currently it has been removed from the PAM configuration for sshd and gdm, we might need to remove it from others as well.

   $ X keyboard settings : Due to a bug the X keyboard settings were not being correctly configured by the system-setup-keyboard daemon. No matter what settings were put into =/etc/sysconfig/keyboard= it always configured X to use a =us= style keyboard layout. Annoyingly this package only has an upstart configuration so it was necessary to patch the package to avoid it being started at boot time. Currently X is being configured by the LCFG file component putting the correct =gb= configuration into the =/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/= directory. We need a better long-term solution to this issue.

   $ Package list tests : Stephen has added a header, =lcfg/options/tests-package-lists.h=, and a set of profiles which can be used for testing sets of package lists for conflicts. The profiles are in the =lcfgtests= rfe map, currently we are only checking the f13 platform, they are named like =f13-pkglist-01= and there are currently 8 separate tests. These profiles are built on the LCFG test server to avoid adding unnecessary stuff to the main servers. The idea is that the profiles will follow the _testing_ release and each Monday evening a script will be run to generate chroots from each test configuration. Any errors would be reported back to MPU.

---+++ Miscellaneous Development

   $ SL5.5 : Stephen has completed the preparatory work necessary for SL5.5 to go out to the _stable_ machines. It has been running on _develop_ for a couple of weeks now without any major issues. A few small tweaks were required to the set of i386 libraries which are added to x86_64 machines. This was particularly confusing given we are currently supporting 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5, with this in mind it would be good to drop SL5.4 as soon as possible. The proposed date for the roll out of SL5.5 is Thursday 29th July, Stephen will inform COs of this date.

   $ LCFG build tools : Stephen has rewritten the RPM building part of the LCFG build tools to remove the dependency on the Perl RPM4 module, this means that F13 is now supported. He also fixed lots of minor bugs, implemented a few feature requests and applied some patches to improve !MacOSX support.

---+++ Operational

   $ Dual-path FC for _metropolitan_ : The Inf Unit reported at the last Operational Meeting that the dual-path fibre channel configuration for _metropolitan_ is not correct. One of the connections should be switched to the other fibre switch for better redundancy.

   $ Storage Arrays : The new storage arrays for the VM servers should arrive next week.

   $ Perl AFS module : The Perl AFS module has been causing more problems, this time for Craig with his prometheus development. We only have the newer version (2.6.2) on _develop_ machines, everything else is held back to the last known good version. Stephen needs to do some more investigation into why this problem occurs, it appears that a local patch to support perl 5.10 does not work with perl 5.8. Supposedly there should be another new upstream version available soon with lots more fixes. Hopefully at that point we might need fewer local patches and can get the same version working everywhere.

---+++ This Week

Alastair will:
   * <strike>Amend dates for "review project list and prioritise"</strike>
   * Look at new installroot for SL5.5
   * Talk to Craig about dual-pathing bpbeast

Chris will:
   * work for the RAT unit, mainly on Hadoop

Stephen will:



-- Main.StephenQuinney - 21 Jul 2010
Topic revision: r3 - 21 Jul 2010 - 15:06:29 - AlastairScobie
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