14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman CERN Site Report HEPiX April 1999 RAL Alan Silverman CERN/IT/DIS

14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman Central service growth - now 5 mail servers in operation with Mail5 recently added. Listbox service being overhauled. Now 12 servers in total Usage and registered users rising - now accounts, 7000 active Quickmail migration completed on time (Dec 1998) MSmail migration started and ahead of target; Y2K deadline! Users moving to Netscape client Web tools for changing password, vacation message, forward address, etc.

14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman AFS Using cheap AFS servers based on PCs are now production: We are now up to 14 PCs with 32GB each. Next batch (7 more nodes) will have 64GB each. EIDE discs seem just fine in operation, just as fast as SCSI Solaris on Intel seems to have been a good choice - and so cheap! 100 francs per GB of raw disc space. We use this for project space, no RAID AFS/NT use growing; some groups use it wholly (including storing Windows apps); some groups request it to be pre-installed on new PCs - licensing question.

14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman Linux Current CD distribution based on Redhat 5.1 Still using MIT AFS but will switch to Transarc version as part of AFS 3.5 upgrade Physics usage rising rapidly - NA48 recently switched to it, away from NT. Overall we saw a 10% rise in the first half of March alone! Now more than 500 nodes at CERN use SUE/Linux Time for a Linux project to complete the HEP offering? What’s missing?

14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman UNIX Experiments agree to freeze HP-UX at version No plans for version 11 Look again in 2 years (Merced chip?) Other candidates for quick-freezing? Linux on all platforms, not just Intel? Year 2000 web pages with lists of versions, patches, etc. //nicewww.cern.ch/~favrot/year_2000.htm

14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman Outsourcing Desktop Contract signed Sept; started Jan. New type of contract for CERN - service- based not manpower) - Handover of tasks less painful than expected, 2/3 rd of staff transferred to the new contract Still a lot of learning to do on all sides (contractor, support team, users) Experiments now looking at their options.

14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman Problem Report Mgmt System Chose Remedy, the market leader (or at least one of) Will use it to monitor/adapt Service Level Agreement of new contract Implementation in full swing but non-trivial Will switch off existing Gnats by end-year (Y2K problem) and move to only Remedy.

14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman Batch Systems and CDR Storage systems talks on Friday More and more PC farms, especially for simulation, both NT and Linux according to users’ requests, but more Linux than NT Moving the CS2 to PCs and SUN 450s.

14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman Tapes STK installation now 32 drives in 4 silos 10 new Redwood 9840 (Eagle) drives: fast, 20GB capacity Linux tape servers being introduced 10-16K mounts per week All old 3480 and 3490 cartridges copied to Redwood cartridges.

14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman Lights-out Operations No longer manual tape mounts during nights or weekends and heavy use of robots for central data recording and analysis batch Unicenter and Tivoli just too expensive Evaluated real savings of lights out - single person cover against call-out of contract staff to repair problems - no clear savings and some loss of service quality Will introduce Patrol to assist operators.

14 th April 1999CERN Site Report, HEPiX RAL. A.Silverman New Group - IA What is an Internet Application? Today it is Mail, News, Videoconferencing and Web browsing. Later they will add Calendaring Mail Talks later this week.