Pile of Dross

Upgrade dcache to 1.6.6-1

World’s biggest grid seeks secrets of the universe

Silicon has a go at explaining what I do. Though they do seem to have got confused between Tier 2 sites in general and some Tier 2 sites participating in a particular aspect of the whole shebang.

Friday 25th

Holiday

Monday 28th

Holiday

Tuesday 29th

Preparation for downtime tomorrow

Thursday 24 November

Met with CB,BS and MH about RAL-LCG2 – RALPP transfers after egging on from JC to get started. Getting transfers working should be trivial, getting transfers working at 300-500Mb/s may be harder, but this should be easiest T2 site to do.
Change dcache to use fresh pg database for srm requests, either this or the necessary restart of SRM appeared to reduce load on dcache.gridpp to 1~2 from 4~5 though it has since increased.

Wednesday 23rd November

Cleared out failed CMS transfers for files apparently already deleted
Attended GridPP-Storage phone conference
Attended SC phone conference
Deleted remaining files from SC3 tape test

So this CD has been sitting at the end of my Amazon wishlist for a while now, and I finally got round to buying last week to fill out an order to free P&P. For the most part its pretty reasonable, some of the sharper edges have been smoothed over and tracks perhaps flow more than the originals did though perhaps some of the energy and vibrancy has been diluted, but it does emphasis what the lyrics bring to the tracks.
But there’s one track that’s just a travesty – Everybody Hurts. Without the lyrics its lost a huge amount of its power, but the whole track seems to have been done in a sort of jazz/swing style that seems wildly inappropriate and makes the whole thing seem like the soundtrack to some sort of eighties romantic comedy. Ick ick ick.

I think I’m going to make a playlist: R.E.M. plays the music of R.E.M. and play the two back to back, to compare better, though I do think I have a tendency towards “imprinting” – the first version I hear of a track, original or cover, becomes the definitive version to me, and any variance from that first heard version makes me cringe, which may make me partial to the R.E.M originals more than I should be.

What planet is the person who designed the iBook keyboard layout from that requires “§” gets its own key but “#’ is a hidden character (Alt-3)? And the swapping of “@” and double quote from the standard PC layout – why oh why oh why?

pathtape server fell over at weekend – lots of stores piled up. Also some restores for not entirely understood reasons, my current thinking is that the file got written to a pool which tried to store it and hung (or it got stuck behind other stuck stores), the user access the file to see if its there, this causes another pool to try and supply the file – and tries to restore it from tape ( because it thinks it can, which hits some code in our restore script to cope with some backwards compatibilty and caused it to access the pathtape server which it wouldn’t do normally). But I’m sure dCache shouldn’t allow that, each file has a boolean to say whether its on tape or not which is not set until the tape operation is complete so it shouldn’t try and restore it I think.

Copied contents of dcache_1 to another dteam pool and shut it down – I want to use the /pool partition as /var/lib/pgsql/data when the great reorg takes place.

Monday morning operations meeting
Upgraded jra1dch01.gridpp.rl.ac.uk to latest dCache release including pnfs-postgresql and postgresql companion.

dCache still slow, agreed with ST to do upgrade on 30th Nov still need to announce and plan.
User reported suspected corrupted file under dCache, requested cksum, discovered that cksum doesn’t work via pnfs had to do echo “`cat file | cksum` file” to get desired output formatting.

Cleared out more deleted tape files
Turned off csfnfs52_X
TB reported transfer timeouts doing copies after 1 hour – should be 24 – reported to dCache developers