1. Andrew Sansum HEPSYSMAN@RAL 21 March 2000
ITD/CLRC Site Report
Andrew Sansum
21 March 2000

2. Linux 20 Dual Processors in production
40 Dual PIII 600 MHz arrived and being installed
Farm Upgrade to Redhat 6.1 shortly
Move from NQS to PBS soon
Working on smarter installs and upgrades - kickstart/autorpm
Provided demand exists order additional PIII 800+MHz cpus in the summer

3. Linux Growth at Current Spend

4. NT FARM LHCB Production Front End
200K+ events with early versions of SICb
Full production about to start
Front End
NT Terminal Server
Citrix Metaframe being installed at the moment - providing X11 access from Unix
ImageCast being used for system cloning

5. HP Farm Beginning to Plan Rundown of the Service
Oldest (HP 735 nodes) already taken out of service
Termination date will probably be agreed with CNAP on Thursday

6. Network
Wide-area network transfers becoming more common at RAL as a means of shipping HEP data around the UK/world.
Thus need to put in place more control / monitoring software (presently mrtg and ntop).
Growing interest in QoS and managed bandwidth - also smarter (level 3) switches.
Gigabit Ethernet (within HEP network) will probably become necessary this year
GRID Stuff!

7. Security
Network security situation continues to deteriorate - many probes daily
Security related workload will continue to increase over the year.
Site is gradually tightening its firewall - with some success (No incidents since November)
Beginning to automate scan detection and counter-measures (router blocks)
Beginning to look at eliminating clear-text passwords within the site.

8. Conclusion Linux service continues to grow NT Farm/Solaris stable
HP Farm beginning to ramp down
Growing interest in technology to manage the network
Security - some gains made but continues to be a (growing) concern