MPU Meeting Tuesday 27th March 2012

LCFG Server Refactoring

No activity.

Simple KVM Service

The rvirsh script will be in this week's stable release.

A number of people at last week's UKUUG conference were able to confirm that the theory of insufficient entropy in VMs was false. There is a very small risk, perhaps enough to militate against the use of VMs for KDCs, but for all other purposes the problem can be ignored.

SL6 Server Upgrades

OpenAFS 1.6.1 has been tagged in the repository so will be released any day now. This should make possible a functional perl-AFS module for sl6_64.

Almost all defaults packages are now on sl6_64.

Server Hardware

Chris has started the project and started investigations.

Dell's OMSA (OpenManage Server Administrator) software seems to have improved a great deal - instead of being packaged in a single blob which takes liberties with the machine's config on being installed, it's now in several dozen discrete RPM packages which so far seem well behaved. However the capability to perform firmware updates has been moved to a separate product.

HP has something similar, the ProLiant Support Pack for Linux, or PSP, which includes the HP Smart Update Manager (HP SUM).

Miscellaneous Development

• lcfg-sleep : The sleep component in this week's stable release fixes a number of things:
  • It adds sleep support for the new HP 8200.
  • Some machines (e.g. 745s) didn't respond to wake.inf.ed.ac.uk but now will.
  • A key press sometimes failed to wake a machine, for example where a kvm switch was in use.

• SL 6.2 : Stephen has started work on this.
  • He's completed much of the lcfg layer and has now started work on the dice layer.
  • The installroot and the installbase profiles for the two architectures have each been merged into a single cross-architecture profile.

Operational

• SL6 Login Screen : The SL6 login screen will at last have a distinct picture of its own as of next week's stable release. The following week's release will bring "64 bit" or "32 bit" comments to the login screen.

• figgy is now at KB. Alastair has tested it with the KB FibreChannel ATA-free test setup and found no problems. The intention is now to connect northern to FC at KB and use FC space to store northern's more important VMs; then move the last VMs off piccadilly and convert that.

This Week

• Alastair
  • Fix figgy nagios
  • Respond to Neil and move data to new volume
  • RT ticket 57249 re second monitor
  • Inventory project
  • Boot Component - eradicate xxd xxp from our headers

• Chris
  • Merge MPUInternalProcedures with top level MPU page
  • Raise web throttling at ops meeting (discussion topic)
  • SL6 defaults list
  • PD - local url shortener implementation (for not-a-service)
  • Server h/w project

• Stephen
  • Roll out afs 1.6.1 and then perl-AFS module
  • Start Security project at Dev meeting
  • Add SL6 epel to sauce
  • Theon
  • PXE installroot - check documentation about moving link when building pxe root
  • LCFG server project finish off
  • SL 6.2

-- AlastairScobie - 27 Mar 2012