MPU Meeting Tuesday 21st May 2013
New Meeting Time!
In future we'll start our meetings at 9:30am.
RT
We haven't always picked up MPU tickets and some of them haven't been responded to. All tickets will be taken in future by Stephen (first half of week) or Chris (second half) then tackled from there as appropriate.
- Chris and Alastair will meet next week after the MPU meeting.
- Chris will write up the simple KVM service's migration policy.
- Chris will look at widening the width of the Component column in bugs.lcfg.org search results as it's too narrow to be useful.
- We're going to do SL6.4 very soon now.
- We'll develop a freenx service soon.
- We'll adopt pkgsearch into the MPU and we'll shortly be doing a test reinstall of it.
Inventory
Alastair's decided to reverse the schema somewhat. Formerly
system
referred to
item
which referred to
order
. For the new inventory
item
will refer to
system
and
item
will also refer to
order
. This change made a lot of existing code redundant.
Alastair has developed a prototype of a replacement for
invquery
. He wants to simplify
invedit
and support combinations. Stephen suggested using
App::Cmd, a perl module which makes it far easier to develop a command line program which provides a number of built-in commands.
Alastair's going to add some tests.
Login Logs Viewer
The web interface was going rather slowly. Stephen analysed its performance and found several ways to speed it up:
- the number of lookups per entry was cut
- some caching was added
- Adding an index to foreign key columns gave a huge increase in speed.
After the viewer went live, a couple of people found that they were getting Server 500 errors. This came down to a problem with Django: if the user had logged in from a site without a DNS entry, just a numeric IP address, the system falls back to doing a
whois
lookup. That's meant to return ASCII results but in practice people around the world use all sorts of character sets for their whois data. Django expects ASCII results and tries hard to convert them to UTF-8. Stephen added a filter which spots and sanitises non-standard-ASCII characters before they hit Django. Such characters now appear on the web page as question marks.
It needs a template for an error 404 page, partly to make the 404 page look better but also to stop the system from mailing the MPU every time a 404 is produced...
Sleep Enhancements
It goes live in next week's stable release.
Virtual DICE
There's a problem with AFS over a NAT interface. When logging in using DICE credentials GNOME often hangs for a while then times out waiting for AFS.
Chris's elderly Mac was struggling mightily to run the DICE VM .ova file. A VirtualBox wiki may have tips on how to get around this.
LCFG Client Refactoring
Miscellaneous Development
Operational
- Chris has documented the procedure for replacing a failed disk on an R720 at MPUFailedDisk.
- Stephen has moved us up to the latest 358 kernel and to the OpenAFS 1.6.2 client.
This Week
- Alastair
- Educate individuals about inappropriate KVM guest sizes
- Start Inventory project diary
- Inventory project
- Look at App::Cmd
- Pester George about location API
- Look at performance improvement by indexing foreign keys
- RT tickets
- Review outstanding LCFG bugs for prioritisation
- Order a spare 600GB disk for waterloo.
- Consider activities list
- Check SL6 fibre documentation up-to-date
- Move PXE installer mod into bugs from activities list
- Chase Tim for devproj entry for projects.inf
- Chris
-
RT tickets - take any from Wed pm - Fri
- Virtualised DICE image
- looking at local identity caching
- check VirtualBox wiki for relevant Mac tips
- check AFS mailing lists for NAT-related tips
- Review outstanding LCFG bugs for prioritisation
-
Writeup KVM migration policy
-
Look at widening component name length in bugs.lcfg.org
- Stephen
-
RT tickets - take any from Mon - Wed am
- LCFG code cleanup
-
Talk to Graham about limits component
- Look at Graham's apacheconf nagios patch
- Review outstanding LCFG bugs for prioritisation
- Consider activities list
--
AlastairScobie - 21 May 2013