Pile of Dross

Shutdown startup: vacuumed postgres db’s on 350 and pnfs - lots of disk space reclaimed, upgraded pnfs to 8.1.3. Installed slony on pnfs and setup replication to 438 - still needs logrotation and startup scripts to be done, would have taken less time than it did but vi decide to be too clever by half and not show me that the files I was editing were msdos style and not unix. CB was trying to dcap write access working, pointed him towards gsidcap but our system was still in pieces at that point so couldn’t really help out that much. Altered pools once they came up to correct settings for multiple io mover queues. Checked gftp doors now using new gftp queue.
Deleted 200+ tickets from helpdesk after mailstorm due to batch scheduler wierdness.

Last week, I found a website that has been rendered unusuable due to Flash. And this isn’t a kneejerk Flash-hating reaction- the website had added a flash object that popped up when clicked on. However, the layering seem to be screwed up, which meant that the normal flash menu items which were hidden when the popup had been clicked were unclickable even when the popup hadn’t been clicked. Possibly this is a Gecko rendering bug (I tried both Firefox and Camino) but it sufficently irritated me that I wandered off in search of a way of eliminating flash problems. The obvious answer is of course to remove the flash player, but flash is used on various sites I visit for navigation menus and the like, so that’s not really an option. First I came across Nuke Anything Enhanced. A nifty little firefox extension that adds an item to the context menu allowing you to remove items from webpages, unfortunately the I can’t seem to get a context menu up on flash objects its not a whole solution. Next thing that I found was FlashBlock. Another firefox extension, this one prevents the loading of flash objects, leaving an icon to click on if you wish to show it. This in combination with Nuke Anything Enhanced made the irritating webpage usable again.

The power supply in one of my systems decided to die on Wednesday so I browsed over to Quiet PC UK to get a replacement, which turned out to be the same model as I’d bought for another of my systems a few months back so those two systems are now pretty damned quiet - humming gently away in the background, my oldest system is the loudest - it generates a continous whine. But I’m loathe to turn it off even though as a P166MMX it struggles to do more than one thing at a time, as its the first computer that was *mine*, not shared with someone, not for the whole family, mine. Its almost 9 years old and never had a serious component failure. It just keeps slogging away.

Mailed TB logs of a failed FNAL-RAL transfer
Installed various kernel updates
Built postgres 8.1.3 for SL3
Assisted in farm shutdown

Look like the Register got their copy of one the Sc3 press releases. Interestingly none of them mention that these latest results are from a rerun that had to be done because the first set was so bloody awful :-), and that we should have been at this stage about 6 months ago. Note also the blatant attempts in the quotes to appear relevant to the big shindig they’re all at in India at the moment.

I’m not going to say anything more about it - just point out the RAL Log for SC3 and its change history

Phew, one bumper work update that was. (Or is, if you’re reading these reverse chronologically, you freak you)

So what have I done that’s not work related? I’ve joined the e-Science Department Recreational Society, which sounds more formal than it really is - playing Halo on networked x-boxes using multiple data projectors.

Also, I was in the pub with some people from work and we stumbled upon a pub quiz, we were there again this week, but didn’t win anything either time - though my apparent encyclopediac knowledge of tv and film does appear to be worrying some people - particularly me :-)!

I’ve bought my first piece of furniture in 3.5 years - a 2m tall dvd storage tower, freeing up much needed bookcase space for… books. The stack on top of my main bookcase is now down to one deep instead of 3 deep.

16th February

Built postgres 8.1.3 for SL3, helped OS with dCache PoolManager
Mailed Zeus about 2 zero length files
Did various RGMA requests

15th February

Continued configuring new SL4 postgres server
Built slony 1.5 for postgres 8.1.3
GridPP-Storage phone conf
Shadowed ST doing relocateable WN upgrade to LCG 2.7.0

14th February

Mailed CERN about link - turned out to be CERN configuration issue
Mailed Lancaster about pingable host on their end of UKLight for more monitoring
Installed new SL4 postgres server

13th February

Monday Morning Ops meeting
Tweaked RT’s web ui on replies to not attempt to set Ticket owner to current owner - was interacting with autotaking
Restarted gftp servers - all stuck at max transfers
Noticed UKLight down, mailed Site Networking
Setup multiple io queues on disk servers - began restarting quiet ones - leave rest till powerdown
Configured gftp servers to use gftp queue

10th February

Meeting with ST- reviewed Job plan
Setup autotaking of tickets on reply in RT
Reviewed SFT failures for RC report

9th February

TOAST meeting
Mailed TB about huge number of errors reported in dCache logs from file acces from lcgui02 - looks like files not being closed properly - but still not really resolved.
Added query for grid v non-grid usage to T 1 metrics page on wiki

8th February

266,270 couldn’t access yumit - turned out to be nscd still using ip address of old system - nscd -i hosts got things working again
Helpdesk fell over - rebooted

7th February

Installed new certificates - but left keys encrypted causing gridftp transfers to fail for 4 hours - fixed
Checked GridPP-Storage table’s Tier 1 historical numbers for RAS
Supplied UKLight plots to MJB

6th February

Bulk requested 8 host certificates, provided feedback on experience to JJ and MV
Supplied gridusage plots to ST
Sent around updated TOAST agenda

3th February

Holiday

2nd February

Holiday

1st February

Holiday

31st January

Reported 2 problems with yum it to CC
Talking with PS, decide that RT < -> UKIROC Footprints problem was down to problematical site mail server, configured helpdesk to not use that mail server.

30th January

Monday morning ops meeting
Asked ca people about bulk cert request script
Mailed CC & ST about yumit not displaying packages in host detail
Updated scarf helpdesk aliases to point to HPCSG’s footprints box

27th January

Supplied RAS with Grid vs Non-Grid CPU time totals

26th January

Mailed GC some questions for CHEP