ELFms meeting of Tuesday 17th of May 2005.

Present: German (chair), Bill, Veronique (secretary), Murphy, Jan, Marco, Hugo, Thorsten, Harry, Tim, Miro.

Short term actions:

- Harry to circulate the minutes of the rdbms brainstorming of 8th of March

- Bill to circulate the rdbms architecture/design/requirement draft documents

- Miro to converge the set_partition functions in CDB

- Thorsten to circulate the lxserv responsibility list

RDBMS studies for CDB:

Bill summarised what was the outcome of the informal brainstorming on the subject that took place on 8th of March.

Harry had the minutes of that brainstorming but they were not circulated at that time (Action on Harry).

The consensus from that brainstorming was, that Bill would be the architect of the project (if the project gets finally approved), that, before approving the project, we need architecture and design documents, and we need to investigate how to produce the XML profile (usable by the running system) from the data stored in an RDBMS.

Since then:

- Bill has been working on the documents. He will soon give them to German and Veronique for a first feedback, and then, next week, he will circulate them to project-elfms.

-Veronique has provided a view that maps the DB data (of the current SW conf prototype) onto the Global Schema, needed to create an XML file, and Bill has implemented the PL/SQL procedure that allows the creation of the XML file.

- Veronique has worked on an API to the SW configuration DB, at the same time as learning PL/SQL from scratch. Approximately 50% of the use cases have been covered. Then expertise/review from Oracle support will be asked, before doing any further prototype developments.

- Both Bill and Veronique have spent maximum 5 working days on that since the brainstorming (everyday work and holidays preventing from doing much more, but it is planned to finalise this phase by early June).

-o (Miro arrived here)

set_partition function issue in PAN templates:

There are currently 3 functions for configuring partitions in CDB (2 at CERN, one on Quattor CVS), that need to be merged. The task has to be taken in hand by someone urgently. It implies coordination with other sites (NIKHEF, …)

Miro volunteered.

Quattor client upgrade at CERN-CC (see slides):

New stuff in CCM, SPMA, NCM, CDB-CLI (cdbop), SWRep:

- includes new features, bug fixes, change of application names ("edg-" removed)

- not deployed at CERN yet

- locking in place for ncm-ncd and spma

- $SYSNAME , $SYSVERS no available for the components

Deploying these new versions imply changes in

- PrepareInstall

- Lemon sensors

- others ?

Deployment plan: will start with SLC3 RHES3, i386, x86_64, ia64, test on lxdev (1 week), then on one lxplus (1 week), then on the rest of lxplus (1 week), then on all other machines.

LXSERV upgrade to SLC3:

- for info: lxservb02 is on a Vendor call. Cd2sql application has been moved to lxservb01.

- When lxservb02 will be back from VC, it will be reinstalled with SLC3, maybe in B613. It might be used as a 'hot standby' spare machine in case lxservb01 fails. Later lxservb01 will also be upgraded to SLC3.

- the 5 lxserv frontend machines will receive new hardware and will be upgraded 1 by 1. (Timescale: ~ end of July).

- List of responsabilities to be circulated by Thorsten.

Port to ia64 and x86_64 architectures:

JvE: reminded that newcastor depends on LSF (diskservers aer clients)

Question: will ia64 be used for SC3 ?

Miro: asked about 2.6 kernel

Proxy servers:

- deployed on lxbatch SLC3 (33 headnodes)

- 1 flag for spma configuration needs to be added in the profile. It is left up to the Service Managers to do that for their clusters.

- will continue with Apache, unless problems appear, in which case Squid would be looked at.

Savannah tasks/bugs review:

- No time this week.

- Will start by this on next meeting