NorthGrid status Alessandra Forti Gridpp13 Durham, 4 July 2005

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham Outline Sites Resource Summary Posts Sites by Site situation –Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield Installation and configuration dcache Communication Security Conclusions

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham Sites Resources Summary SitekSI2kTBNetworkStatus Lancaster MB ukLight online Liverpool001 GBoffline Manchester GBonline Sheffield24021GBonline

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham Sites Resources Summary SiteOSLCGSRMVOs LancasterSL32_4_0Yes (dcache) 5 LiverpoolSL32_4_0No3 ManchesterSL32_4_0Yes (dcache) 7 SheffieldSL32_4_0No6

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham 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.

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham 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

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham 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?

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham 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

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham 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 s. They fix the problem and don’t close the ticket!

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham 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!

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham 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.

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham 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 –Miscommunication is avoided –The user might not be a user but a hacker better have someone to investigate it

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham 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

4 July 2005Alessandra Forti GridPP13 Durham 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