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14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
CERN Site ReportHEPiX April 1999
RAL
Alan Silverman
CERN/IT/DIS
14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
• Central service growth - now 5 mail servers in operation with Mail5 recently added. Listbox service being overhauled. Now 12 servers in total
• Usage and registered users rising - now 11500 accounts, 7000 active
• Quickmail migration completed on time (Dec 1998)• MSmail migration started and ahead of target; Y2K
deadline! Users moving to Netscape client• Web tools for changing password, vacation message,
forward address, etc.
14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
AFS
• Using cheap AFS servers based on PCs are now production: We are now up to 14 PCs with 32GB each. Next batch (7 more nodes) will have 64GB each. EIDE discs seem just fine in operation, just as fast as SCSI
• Solaris on Intel seems to have been a good choice - and so cheap! 100 francs per GB of raw disc space. We use this for project space, no RAID
• AFS/NT use growing; some groups use it wholly (including storing Windows apps); some groups request it to be pre-installed on new PCs - licensing question.
14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
Linux
• Current CD distribution based on Redhat 5.1 • Still using MIT AFS but will switch to Transarc
version as part of AFS 3.5 upgrade• Physics usage rising rapidly - NA48 recently
switched to it, away from NT. Overall we saw a 10% rise in the first half of March alone! Now more than 500 nodes at CERN use SUE/Linux
• Time for a Linux project to complete the HEP offering? What’s missing?
14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
UNIX
• Experiments agree to freeze HP-UX at version 10.20. No plans for version 11
• Look again in 2 years (Merced chip?)
• Other candidates for quick-freezing? Linux on all platforms, not just Intel?
• Year 2000 web pages with lists of versions, patches, etc. //nicewww.cern.ch/~favrot/year_2000.htm
14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
Outsourcing
• Desktop Contract signed Sept; started Jan.
• New type of contract for CERN - service-based not manpower) - Handover of tasks less painful than expected, 2/3rd of staff transferred to the new contract
• Still a lot of learning to do on all sides (contractor, support team, users)
• Experiments now looking at their options.
14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
Problem Report Mgmt System
• Chose Remedy, the market leader (or at least one of)
• Will use it to monitor/adapt Service Level Agreement of new contract
• Implementation in full swing but non-trivial
• Will switch off existing Gnats by end-year (Y2K problem) and move to only Remedy.
14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
Batch Systems and CDR
• Storage systems talks on Friday
• More and more PC farms, especially for simulation, both NT and Linux according to users’ requests, but more Linux than NT
• Moving the CS2 to 40-50 PCs and SUN 450s.
14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
Tapes
• STK installation now 32 drives in 4 silos
• 10 new Redwood 9840 (Eagle) drives: fast, 20GB capacity
• Linux tape servers being introduced
• 10-16K mounts per week
• All old 3480 and 3490 cartridges copied to Redwood cartridges.
14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
Lights-out Operations
• No longer manual tape mounts during nights or weekends and heavy use of robots for central data recording and analysis batch
• Unicenter and Tivoli just too expensive• Evaluated real savings of lights out - single person
cover against call-out of contract staff to repair problems - no clear savings and some loss of service quality
• Will introduce Patrol to assist operators.
14th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL.
A.Silverman
New Group - IA
• What is an Internet Application?
• Today it is Mail, News, Videoconferencing and Web browsing. Later they will add Calendaring
• Mail Talks later this week.
