Minutes of storage phone conference 08 March 2006 Present: Glasgow: Jamie, Greig Edinburgh: Greig Lancaster: Matt, Brian Tier 1: Derek Imperial: Mona RAL Storage: Owen, Jiri, Jens (chair+mins) Apologies: Jeremy. 0. Review of actions 1. Post-CHEP review -- welcome back, Greig :-) Greig sent a summary of the dCache questions to the list: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0603&L=gridpp-storage&D=1&T=0&O=D&P=651 Jens asked the group if there were issues we need to follow up on. The most obvious is the performance, in particular if we can improve it with XFS. Jamie and Graeme have already had good results for DPM (see mins of previous meeting): http://agenda.cern.ch/fullAgenda.php?ida=a061317 A discussion followed how to run XFS with the SL kernels. CERN has one but it's old and unsupported. Related, a bug with SL 3.0.3 has broken a RAID disk by fiddling with the firmware: https://www.scientificlinux.org/collector.2004-08-03.0265953686/80 Jens asked if anyone has tried 64 bit hardware; Jamie didn't think there is a problem with XFS on 64 bit, but no one in this group had done it (but others in HEPiX). There may be XFS problems with SL4. Another of the dCache issues that will be worth following up on is the use of pools in different ways, to migrate data off fast pools to slow ones. 2. Update on the GLUE storage service hubbub Jens reported that there was an ongoing discussion on project-lcg-data-management with even people who attended the Mumbai workshop disagreeing on the outcome... CASTOR folks want to be able to provide both durable and permanent (in the new sense) on the _same_ SAPath. Which means that the client needs to be able to tell the SRM via the _SRM_interface_ whether it wants the file to be durable or permanent on that SURL path. Which in turn means that the SRM 1 servers need to change the semantics of the wantPermanent flag in srmPut. And the clients not only have to be modified to pick the right SA from the information system, they must also send the right wantPermanent token. Which is no extra biggie for the LCG clients, but it means that non-LCG clients, like srmcp, need to be changed as well, _unless_ they leave the wantPermanent flag as NULL. Otherwise the clients will not be able to upload to either permanent-only or durable-only (in the new sense) SEs. Confused? This is related to the QoS. 3. Experiences with DPM 1.5.$X$, for $X\geq 3$. Nobody has tried them out yet, but Greig volunteered - and Jiri has since the meeting also (been) volunteered. Glasgow will run whichever one comes with gLite 3.0 in PPS. 4. Experiences with GSI{DCAP,RFIO}? Volunteers? Not much experience yet. This is related to item 3, because DPM 1.5.X is said to have GSIRFIO enabled by default. Mona reports problems with GSIDCAP, following the latest CA upgrade. She will send details to the list (ACTION). Related to that, Mona reported high IO rate on her dCache pool. She will send details to the list and the experts will investigate (ACTION). 5. dCache information system Owen now has a test suite for the information system [via lcg-*], and is looking for volunteers to test the YAIM dCache GRIS install and configuration. Matt had previously run tests but then his kit exploded; Paul had also done some testing but got pulled off to do other stuff. 6. Security service challenges? Jens reported that he'd come across a file security service challenge, which is an old idea we've had. Since we were running out of time here, Jens will follow up with Ian Neilson (ACTION). https://uimon.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/LCG/SSC2 7. AOB Nothing else. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ACTIONS 41 10/08/2005 Agree licence with DESY Jens Open No news. 53 12/10/2005 Find reasoanable % for SE uptime for SC4 Jeremy Open Reassigned. Follow up with GDB et al No news; nothing is required yet. 54 02/11/2005 Report on performance/scalability with pools on WNs Paul Open Progress. Will put in wiki. NB: dcache pools No news. 57 02/11/2005 Investigate StoRM Jiri Open Wait for INFN report No news; Jens will get in touch with the person from INFN. 60 16/11/2005 Add client wsdl->library recipe to wiki Jens Open No news. 78 25/01/2006 Get sites to forward details of their disk setups Greig Open No news. Maybe more usefully subsumed under the 10 questions. 82 01/02/2006 Produce file QoS summary document Jens Open 86 08/02/2006 Extend monitoring to do sites per VO and VOs per site Greig? Open Now assigned to "Greig" rather than to "Greig?". Graeme offered assistance. 88 08/02/2006 Report whether FTS 1.5 supports SRM 2.1 Graeme Open Jens apologised; this should have been closed. 91 22/02/2006 Add an SRM 2.1 tests page to the wiki Jiri Open See also #75 Still needed, for the high level tests. 93 22/02/2006 Add 10 questions page to the Wiki? Jens Open No news. Note the 10 questions is for the users, so is different from the 10 site questions (networks, for admins). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NEW ACTIONS 94 08/03/2006 Report GSIDCAP/CA package bug to list Mona Open 95 08/03/2006 Report high IO rate pool problem to list Mona Open 96 08/03/2006 Follow up with Ian Neilson re storage security challenge Jens Open