MPU Meeting Tuesday 11th June 2013

Inventory

Nothing happened

Login Logs

Nothing happened. Stephen plans to get back onto writing up the project once 6.4 is out of the way.

Sleep

There are problems with the Dell Optiplex 780 and remote wake-up. The monitor can become locked into a sleep state which can only be fixed by rebooting the machine. Stephen suggested that we check if any 780s were being remotely woken prior to the recent changes in the sleep component. This would allow us to judge whether the problem is caused by the recent kernel update. We could also try switching a 780 to SL6.4 once it's ready to see if that helps.

There are approximately 110 of these machines running DICE. For now we will just disable sleep on this model.

To test whether a BIOS update would help Chris needed to use a PXE bootable freedos image. This seems like a generally useful thing to have available so we should package this up and make it part of our standard PXE boot options.

Virtual DICE

Chris has written up the notes on the various ways we could configure the DICE VM.

LCFG Client Refactoring

Nothing happened.

Misc Devel

SL6.4

Stephen has been working through the SL6.4 upgrade preparation. The lcfg and ed level headers and package lists have been done, he is now working on the dice level packages. Chris is going to look at building the install CD and PXE stuff. As part of this work tests have been added for the lcfg KVM and options package lists so we can avoid package version conflicts.

Operational

Not a lot of operational work this week.

Personal Development

• Stephen to do block of PDP once 6.4 work and login logs project completed, before starting on next project. Perhaps logs processing stuff with python.

This Week

• Alastair
  • Read Chris's VirtuallyDICEModes (ASAP)
  • Look at version of libvirt on stable (and develop) - why was this? Need to keep pinned (in kvm-server.h)
  • Educate individuals about inappropriate KVM guest sizes
  • Start Inventory project diary
  • Inventory project
    • Look at App::Cmd
    • Pester George about location API
    • Brain dump
  • Review outstanding LCFG bugs for prioritisation
  • Order a spare 600GB disk for waterloo.
  • Determine next project for Stephen.
  • Server reboots

• Chris
  • Virtualised DICE image
    • Work on local LDAP (eg dump into a dbm file)
  • Review outstanding LCFG bugs for prioritisation
  • Look at LCFGLinuxInstall and attempt build for SL6.4
  • Look through sleep logs to see if anybody has woken Dell 780s before the recent problem occurred
  • Make FreeDOS a system wide PXE option (and document)
  • Some MPU server reboots

• Stephen
  • Read Chris's VirtuallyDICEModes (ASAP)
  • Work on SL6.4 upgrade
  • Login Logs project - admin notes, code docs, final report
  • Some MPU server reboots

• Carol