MPU Meeting Tuesday 31st August 2010

LCFG Server Refactoring

Due to an expected lack of time from Simon over the next couple of months we will propose at the Development Meeting that this project be stalled. This requires us to accept the (slight) security risk of pinning back the version of perl on the LCFG servers in the meantime.

Software Build Farm

We will propose starting this project at the Development Meeting. The project plan has been filled out at devproj#115 and milestones added.

Installroot

Alastair has now built the F13 installer on an F13 machine using the stable release. He has put the new CD images into the MPU AFS group space but still needs to update the PXE installer. Alastair will look at the buildtestingcd and buildstablecd scripts in the lcfg-release-scripts package and update them so that the CD images are built each week. Due to SL5 lacking support for modern RPMs there will still be a need for manual steps in the F13 PXE configuration, the documentation needs a note to that effect. The installroot and PXE documentation now needs tidying and updating to reflect the changes.

F13

The main F13 issue that needs resolving is gdm support. It would be nice (but not essential) to be able to configure the background and add a welcome message. We should find out what requirements we really must have. We also need to check with RAT about exam desktop usage of gdm. It might be possible to solve the problems using the gconf component provided by IS. We could manually configure a machine with gconf and then convert that into resources for the component.

The second big issue is thunderbird and the way it is now configured to automatically mirror all mail to the local disk. We must check that RAT are going to deal with the issue. Possibly it can be configured in the same way as firefox?

Stephen brought the versions of various components into line across all platforms. Unfortunately this resulted in the discovery of a bug in the RPM trigger scripts of the ffox component. This left the component in a "stopped" state which had to be fixed with a restart via a cron job.

Stephen has also spotted a problem with the file component which meant it is not running on lots of F13 machines. This will be resolved early on Wednesday morning when all the lab machines are rebooted.

Miscellaneous Development

New storage array

This has arrived and Alastair has been working on the configuration. The website and monitoring systems for the array have to run on a different machine and they are "packaged" in a peculiar way which requires running a binary which spits out some RPMs. The plan is to see if installing these RPMs is enough or whether the binary does some other configuration as well. Once this array is running we will use it for the storage needs of our AFS server, telford, as well as the VMs.

Package list tests

Stephen is now satisfied that his package list testing scripts are working well. He will start running them against the testing release and add SL5 support. He will document what they do and how to respond to any problems which they might reveal.

Personal Development

We will all review our personal development lists and choose projects to bring forwards for the next quarter. The plan is to dedicate a few days as a whole chunk on one topic rather than a scattering of a few hours now and again over a long period.

Operational

piccadilly

Chris has handed this over to the techs to check the RAM. After 5 days of being turned off it all seemed to be working but then the issue cropped up once more after a while of running. The question is whether the problem is heat related. Memory tests are being run and we should check (by swapping around) whether it is associated with one particular stick of RAM or one particular location on the motherboard.

tibs docs

Chris has finished documenting how to package tibs and alter the component.

metropolitan

This is now running some VMs. Tim had problems with the VMWare web interface being very unresponsive at times which resulted in him creating storage for one of his VMs multiple times (which now needs cleaning up). Eventually he worked out it was doing things, just very slowly. He's very happy with the speed of the running VMs, they are much more responsive than those on bakerloo.

Reboots

All MPU reboots for the SL5.5 upgrade have been done.

This Week

Alastair will:

• Finish F13 installroot
• Ethernet card for HP D180
• Talk to Iain about F13 and thunderbird
• Look at the new storage array

Chris will:

• RAT

Stephen will:

• Software Build Farm
• F13 and LCFG website
• Package list test scripts

-- StephenQuinney - 31 Aug 2010