Pile of Dross

Annouced downtime for SRM on Thursday fro upgrade
Discussed with RAS and JC possibilty of getting GGUS, Footprints and RT to talk to each other without creating extraneous tickets anywhere.
Began creating plots of srm stats using existing stats creation framework.
Checked logfiles to see if any discernible reason why connection from an SE at Glasgow was not getting data when using FTS, verified that FTS tranfers RAL-RAL work successfully, I suspect firewall issues somewhere.

Poking around at dcache -tried setting umask on dcache processes to see if I can get files to be written as group-writeable, this would allow us to remove a hacky cron job that wanders round setting things which aren’t group writeable, group writeable
Asked dcache developers about deleting old entries from the srm persistency database – I’m hopeful it’ll increase srm reponse by reducing query time, but it will be a disk space issue eventually as well.
Turned on query logging on the test (JRA1) postgres instance to see what queries are done for various operations, saw that ls -l in the SRM admin cell queries putrequests and putrequest_b, similarly for get and copy which explains why it times out so often
First meeting with ST, decided to try for 2 meetings a month
– Discussed reducing srm get lifetime on disk srm to 10 minutes, from 1 hour, I think FTS has a 3 minute timeout, possibly check with JC
– Going to upgrade dcache next week, need to get notice out Monday for Thursday intervention probably
– Considering moving information system on dcache-tape onto head node, to make srm systems easier to ressurect from disk failure.
– Consider using failover (HA-Linux) , would need test servers to try things out.

Installed menus on scrooge – need to package up now I now they work.
Decided to use HTML for TOAST menu instead of XML – less to learn, now happy with stylesheet layout so beginning adding links from word document

Attended SC phone conference
Restarted SRM – tweaked transfer numbers down
Worked on styling agenda for TOAST

Tuesday 20 September

Reduced number of allowed transfers in main SRM and restarted
Recasting TOAST meeting agenda into XML
Requested dcache be added to sure

Monday 19th September

Added usage stats to info system – needed to change dn that dynamic script generated from GlueSARoot to GLueLocalID to get information included
Running queries on dCache SRM database, e.g.

select creationtime/3600000 as foo, state,count(*) from getfilerequests_b where creationtime > ((date_part(’epoch’, now())-604800)*1000) group by foo,state order by foo;

which gives an hourly break down of get requests for the past week.
Doing various updates to boxes, removing httpd from those that don’t need it.

Friday 16th September

Investigating info system on dcache-tape – trying to include space usage stats

Restarted PinManager
Rebooted RB
Built rpm for envmon script

PinManager, hung overnight, restarted, have added PinManager to the dcache cell webpage, next step is to write a monitoring script to grab the web page and check it for unexpected differences.
Responded to various queries, as the PinManager hang had stopped users getting files out of dcache
Debugged with MJB an automount config of pnfs on the WNs
Attended GridPP Storage phone conference.

Reinstalled scrooge with SL4
Started to rpmify envmon

Oh dear, this blog does seem to have descended into acronym soup somewhat – Grid Acronym Soup to be precise. Still it does make slightly more sense if you know that C.M.S. here normally means the LHC experiment Compact Muon Solenoid, rather than Content Management System, but not much more.

I’ve bought the fifth Harry Potter (Audio)book off iTunes to listen to on my ipod on the way to work. I didn’t listen to it today due to a disagreement with iTunes about what the words

iPod Sync Complete

actually mean, so instead listened to a loop of Tori Amos’ cover of I don’t like Mondays, something that may possibly concern my fellow commuters if they knew :-). So no opinion on it so far, other than if the intention is to stop people buying unofficial then they may want to consider lowering the price to something a little less extortionate;I mean for 50ukp I could probably buy all the sodding paper books and still have at least tenner left over.

This means I’ll be “reading” 3 books:

Annotated DragonLance Chronicles, amusing if only for the attempts to claim that spelling differences were intentional

Quicksilver, picked this up before I left for DESY along with Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet and didn’t manage to finish it before I came back, which is the first time on a work trip that I haven’t finished all my reading material by halfway through. Indeed even reading it throughout the train journeys up north and back again I’m still only 4/5s of the way through

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, as mentioned above