UCL Site Report Ben Waugh HepSysMan, 22 May 2007

Desktops About 50, up to 5 years old Scientific Linux (CERN) –most still SLC3, moving to SLC4 –not all 64-bit capable NFS home directories and /usr/local –moving to rsync for /usr/local Also Windows Terminal Service for Office etc. –problems with Samba, print spooler –moving to use UCL central service –issues: printing, PDF creation

Laptops Increasingly used for travel and as desktop replacement Range of models and operating systems Limited support, but aim to install SLC where required Private VLAN, firewalled from main subnet

Batch farm 17 dual-CPU 2.4 GHz Dell PowerEdge Torque/Maui SLC3

LCG LCG service nodes submit jobs to batch farm Secondary to local users Useful for development of Grid-enabled software 1 TB for ATLAS served by DPM pool node

UCL Research Computing Central Computing Cluster part of London Tier-2 New SRIF3 procurement in progress –expect over 2500 cores –storage sufficient to meet GridPP plans –also available for local job submission

Storage Home directories on 300 GB RAID –moving soon to larger RAID Two 5-TB RAIDs (EonStor) Two smaller RAIDs for backup (RLBackup) Various RAIDs bought by CDF and MINOS No tape! Mounted via NFS on desktops and farm Group quotas are a nuisance –possibly move to Logical Volume Management (LVM)

Recently installed new server – quite smooth! More powerful machine –old one overwhelmed by virus scanning etc. Dovecot and Exim Introduced quotas and max attachment size Spam filtering –SpamAssassin on UCL mail hub –still a problem

Web server Group and user home pages eLog TWiki Room booking, library database…

Collaborative tools Video conferencing –hardware H.323 clients (Aethra Vega X3) –various software tools: iChat etc. –VRVS –EVO? Voice over IP –various tools available and used: Skype, Gizmo, iChat –UCL producing guidance on Skype –no clear best solution

Other services SSH gateways Code development server –CVS –Subversion –Trac Various databases –mostly mirroring experiment databases –each insist on their own preferred MySQL version

Monitoring etc. Nagios Investigating remote management tools –currently just SSH –could use serial over IP –remote power control

The future Moving to new machine room –latest estimate is November 2007 Move to SL(C)4 –mixture of 32- and 64-bit for a while Would like to improve: –hardware and configuration management –collaborative tools: VC, VOIP Would like to see more sharing of “best practice” –LCG system management working group –Wiki:

Issues Providing consistent support from fractional FTEs Storage –choice of file system –finding bottlenecks –space management Management of configuration, user accounts, hardware… –group has been growing