4-8 th october 1999cern site report, hepix slac. a.silverman cern site report hepnt/hepix october...

4-8th October 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX SLAC.

A.Silverman

CERN Site ReportHEPNT/HEPiX October 1999

SLAC

Alan Silverman

CERN/IT/DIS


A.Silverman

E-Mail

• Central service : major overhaul of all servers, O/S upgrades, Y2K fixes, disc+memory upgrades

• MSmail migration completed 4 months ahead of target• Still recommend Netscape but every new version has its

share of new bugs• New Listbox service, still based on Majordomo, major

cleanup, many huge lists• Spam mail an ongoing problem; averages 10K mails

rejected daily with peaks 3-4 times higher


A.Silverman

LDAP

• New LDAP server from the Sun/Netscape alliance was chosen.

• New schema being implemented (much richer)• Meeting with IN2P3 and LAL at Lyon last week• A successful US trip - could be useful for other sites

mailwww.cern.ch/documents/officials/ustrip99.html– in particular a clear status on the Sun/Netscape alliance

(which is really working in practice)

– interesting presentations by Mirapoint


A.Silverman

AFS

• AFS transferred to PDP Group • Buying more Intel PCs as servers and looking at using

Linux as O/S, at least for scratch space• Plans for moving to Transarc Linux on PCs and AFS 3.5

everywhere – all new Linux clients use Transarc’s AFS 3.5

– first file servers moving to 3.5

– clients and database servers will stay 3.4 till at least end-year

– a few problems seen with 3.5 but not serious


A.Silverman

Linux

• Current CD distribution based on Redhat 5.1; pressure for Redhat 6 (kernel 2.2 features wanted)

• Physics usage rising rapidly - more physics groups “retreating” from NT

• Linux project getting underway: start from scratch - if Linux is the only UNIX being developed, would we need tools like SUE for example?

• Kickstart server in production use, >160 clients (mainly Comp Centre and LHCB exp.)


A.Silverman

UNIX

• Year 2000 web pages (versions, patches, etc) //nicewww.cern.ch/~favrot/year_2000.htm

• Prelim plans to freeze all non-Linux UNIXs met considerable resistance; freeze = ??

• Discussions continue but only PCs (and some SUNs) are being bought by physicists

• Installed StarOffice on Linux and Solaris; Redhat 6+AFS problem; how compatable with Msoffice? Support issues?


A.Silverman

Windows Plans

• New NICE team manager (F.Hemmer)

• Agreed to skip Windows 98, update Windows 95 instead and complete the NT4 offering under NICE

• Windows 2000 as a NICE client soon (1-2 months?) after release; pilot working now

• Windows 2000 architecture group started


A.Silverman

Printing

• Central printer servers, with fail-over

• Based on lpr protocol, both UNIX and Windows

• 1200 queues, 14K jobs per day, 7GB per day

• User-friendly interfaces (Print Wizard on NICE, Xprint on UNIX, web-based Java interface also)

• Almost all Springer queues now switched

• Tools being put (back) in the public domain


A.Silverman

PC Supply

• Managed to keep the same base configuration for 9 months and with lowering prices - is this a record

• Now in market survey for new supplier, will soon issue a call for tender

• Supplier relationship more important than price of any given configuration


A.Silverman

Outsourcing

• Desktop Contract started January 1st, based on service levels

• Still a lot of learning to do on all sides but mostly on the CERN side!

• Experiments have agreed to merge in over 2 years

• Contract seems to be working but no performance figures to prove it yet


A.Silverman

Problem Report Mgmt System

• Chose Remedy, the market leader (or at least one of)

• Implementation is non-trivial and we are late, no performance figures yet

• With its licences, fully-configured servers with lots of disc space and consultants to help, Remedy is not a cheap solution

• Plans to help experiments delayed


A.Silverman

Networking

• Central Data Recording using Gigabit networking for all exps, >40MB/sec

• PDP/CORE servers moved to Fast Ethernet (1000 nodes) or Gigabit Ethernet (50 nodes)

• First deployment of 100BaseT on desktops


A.Silverman

Batch Systems

• PCs, PCs, PCs. We expect +100 in the coming 4-6 weeks alone

• First interactive Linux cluster coming online; will move to Redhat 6.0 and AFS 3.5 very soon

• Starting a new monitoring project in order to be able to manage 100s (1000s?) of PCs

• Tests of IDE discs for servers; may be too early for next purchases but interesting


A.Silverman

Central Data Recording

• CDR again very successful this year; major experiment was again NA48 -- 100 TB of raw data with an average of 20 MB/s (45 MB/s peak), 2400 Redwood STK tapes. Large Online/Oflline LINUX PC farm (70 PCs)

• Plus CDR for 20 test beams (ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, L3C) mainly using HPSS, 3 OBJECTIVITY setups, several TB of data

• Next are NA45 (30-40 MB/s), NA49 (16 MB/s) and preparations for COMPASS (35 MB/s)


A.Silverman

Tapes

• Fourth STK silo, now 32 drives including 4 for HPSS

• Redwood servers now based on Linux except for the HPSS servers

• CASTOR - attend Tony Cass’s progress report later in the week

4-8 th october 1999cern site report, hepix slac. a.silverman cern site report hepnt/hepix october...

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