MPU Meeting Tuesday 23rd April 2013

Inventory

The project is now officially started. Alastair is continuing to do lots of work on a prototype using DBIx::Class. He has been working on the schema in greater detail and gaining a better understanding of how the current system functions.

Login Logs Viewer

The website now has a comodo SSL certificate thanks to Toby.

Sleep Enhancements

Chris has fixed a bug in the sleep component which meant that the idleness detection waited for a long time after the user had already logged out.

Stephen noted that David Sterratt had spotted a disparity between the numbers of wake and sleep events for some hosts in the logs.

Virtual DICE

Chris now has a virtual machine using DHCP which all works with NAT enabled. There is a local "guest" account which can be used even when networking is disabled. DICE logins work as normal when network connectivity is available. There is still an issue related to LDAP access when the VM is outside of the Informatics network. Currently it is inaccessible and even if it where the connectivity might not be reliable enough for this to work. We should look at a really simple caching solution for the necessary authorisation information.

There was a question of whether to allow nsu access or whether we should use the more standard sudo. Stephen preferred sudo as this is what most users will be familiar with, it is also well documented and we could easily restrict which commands the users are permitted to execute.

It was agreed that we would configure the size to be dynamic so that the image is no bigger than absolutely necessary.

LCFG Client Refactoring

Miscellaneous Development

udev component

The idea of creating an LCFG component to manage udev has been suggested by Graham.

mail log perms

We need to look at the access permissions for the mail log files. Alastair will talk to Neil about this as it's not clear who "owns" this problem.

LCFG gconf component

Alastair has shipped the new gconf component along with the necessary configuration to reduce the time a system waits before powering-down a monitor.

Operational

R715 bonding issue

The Dell R715 catzilla has a problem with network bonding, see RT:61762 for details. Chris is investigating.

kilmarnock

The machine attached to the display in meeting room 5.02 has been having problems with the display since we removed the AMD Catalyst driver. It's now using the open-source radeon driver but has the wrong display size (1024x768) and the image is slightly offset. Alastair will keep trying to improve the setup but this room won't be in use much longer so it's not likely to be a high priority. See RT:61715 for details.

Old machines

The disks have been wiped for all old MPU servers.

Kernel I/O performance

Alastair has been investigating the I/O performance of the latest SL6 kernel (2.6.32-358 series). It appears that there has been a 30% drop in performance, if that is the case for more than just this model we will not be able to switch to this new kernel for, at least, file servers.

xorg-x11-font-utils

Upgrading the xorg-x11-font-utils package did not fix the xemacs issues. Since then Perdita has discovered that the cause was a problem with her xemacs configuration. We should ask her for details of the fix so that we can help anyone else with the same problem.

kubelik

The student SSH server has moved to kubelik. The old server, dunlin, has been moved to the Forum and the disk has been wiped.

This Week

* Alastair

• • Educate individuals about inappropriate KVM guest sizes
  • Start inventory project
  • Start Inventory project diary
  • RT tickets
  • Review outstanding LCFG bugs
  • Finish off RT:61715 (kilmarnock X)
  • Discuss mail logperms with Neil (make default secure at LCFG)
  • Check northern/piccadilly are correctly bonded (re INF unit suggestion)

• Chris
  • Ask Perdita how she fixed her Xemacs problem - and write a blog article, if appropriate
  • RT tickets
  • Virtualised DICE image - looking at local identity caching
  • Look at RT:61762 - perhaps a later 279 kernel available
  • Review outstanding LCFG bugs

• Stephen
  • RT tickets
  • Deploy and publish user log viewer (and blog article)
  • LCFG code cleanup

• Carol
  • carry out an audit to make sure that all guests are still required to free up resources for new guests, shouldn't leave unused, half-managed machines lying around

-- AlastairScobie - 17 Apr 2013