northgrid status alessandra forti gridpp13 durham, 4 july 2005

NorthGrid status

Alessandra FortiGridpp13

Durham, 4 July 2005

4 July 2005 Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham

Outline

• Sites Resource Summary• Posts• Sites by Site situation

– Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield

• Installation and configuration• dcache• Communication • Security• Conclusions


Sites Resources Summary

Site kSI2k TB Network Status

Lancaster 464.6 2+30 290MBukLight

online

Liverpool 0 0 1 GB offline

Manchester

40 0.5 1 GB online

Sheffield 240 2 1GB online


Sites Resources Summary

Site OS LCG SRM VOs

Lancaster SL3 2_4_0 Yes (dcache)

5

Liverpool SL3 2_4_0 No 3

Manchester

SL3 2_4_0 Yes (dcache)

7

Sheffield SL3 2_4_0 No 6


Posts

• 4.5 FTE have been filled– Lancaster: Matt Doidge – Liverpool: Pawel Trepka– Manchester: Marc Kelly, Colin Morey– Sheffield: Andrew Beresford (0.5 FTE)

• Posts are working for each university and there is no common effort but they meet at the monthly technical meeting and report on sites situation and exchange information there.


Lancaster

• New Farm has been installed in May– Few problems with RGMA and publishing

• the latter mostly due to a change in the name of the CE

• SC3 participation– Connected to ukLight and to the production

network• In the process of subnetting and dual homing

– Installing two dcache storage elements• To avoid overlapping between production network and

ukLight traffic

– Installing other required software like FTS, LFC


Liverpool

• Still offline • The new post hopefully will solve the

manpower problem • Last 10 days a peak of effort to install

LCG– Didn’t quite make it for today but

hopefully will continue also after GridPP

• Perhaps next quarter Liverpool will be online?


Manchester

• At the moment– Still online with the old cluster: 40kSI– UI software being installed on department desktops– Dcache installed on 2 WNs

• The order for the new cluster has been placed– It is due to arrive at the beginning of august– Electricity bills sorted

• sharing part of the cpus with engineers (not discussed yet how)

• Main effort dedicated to prepare the structure– Setting up servers, networking, monitoring, security- Surveying assembly of the nodes, installation and testing– Establishing cooperative relations with MCC– Working on dcache configuration


Sheffield

• Not much to say about Sheffield – It is the best site in NorthGrid

• Always on time with updates• Cluster always full of jobs• Totalised ~15300 kSI hours ~5 times hours

than the second site.• Really active Atlas user asking a lot of user

questions

– The only note I can make is that they tend not to answer emails. • They fix the problem and don’t close the

ticket!


Installation and configuration

• Installation easiness greatly improved.☺YAIM installs and configures a standard site very

easily☺YAIM can be easily debugged and fixed when

things go wrong☺YAIM can be extended for non standard sites☺Can be plugged in a kickstart×YAIM doesn’t configure a site to be secure

• Security recipes should go in the installation notes or on a security WEB site not in the scripts.

☺In general has made sys admins life much easier!


Dcache

• Lancaster and Manchester have installed dcache– Different configurations:

• Lancaster has dedicated data servers• Manchester is using (2) WNs disk space

– YAIM merely installs the components and starts the services

• It doesn’t configure the dcache nor the Info System (waiting for new LCG release to see improvements

– Dcache configuration documentation is lacking– Examples of hardware configuration and requirements are

lacking– SRM available/space per VO cannot be easily calculated

• Matter of configuration again?

• Installation experience at different sites has been very different.


Communication with the external world

• Users and experiments should open tickets not write directly to sys admin.– Users don’t have to know site contact addresses– Miscommunication is avoided– Tickets send automatic reminders– An escalation procedure is followed if the problem is not

solved– Tickets are traceable

• Sys admin should write to the ROC about rogue users– The sys admin doesn’t have to know about user personal

email– Miscommunication is avoided– The user might not be a user but a hacker better have

someone to investigate it


Security

• Has it been said often enough?– Very simple things to check and block at OS

configuration level that can improve security• Portmap• Ssh• Inetd• Cron acls• Root password• Switching off unused services (port table out of date

and confusing) • Monitoring ports for services• Monitoring network traffic whe n something weird is

noticed


Conclusions

• NorthGrid is slowly coming together– Posts are in place– Expected equipment has been setup or is on

its way– Technical information is exchanged during

the monthly technical meetings• It could be more often but one step at the time

– Networking is being followed up in two sites– SRM/dcache has been installed at two sites– One of the sites has a very good running

record

northgrid status alessandra forti gridpp13 durham, 4 july 2005

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