Operational Meeting

Apologies for absence

Alison, Carol.

minutes of the last meeting.

These were accepted.

Alastair went over the planned schedule for kitting out the Forum. We need to think about how we will scheduling server moves. Not clear what swipe access will be available and when.

The mock lab examinations had run smoothly. Some machines seemed to be very slow in picking up their profile changes - Stephen thought this may be that they are missing their UDP packets and then relying on the client profile poll time of 10 minutes.

Reports from units.

• Infrastructure.
  2. SL5: Kerberos and LDAP masters

     Everyone was happy for Kerberos and LDAP to be unavailable during upgrade to SL5.

  Currently working on the manual configuration of the 100odd switches for the Forum.

• Managed Platform.
• Research and Teaching.
• Services.
• User Support.

  3. Work on AT is likely to mean that not all server upgrades to SL5 will be completed by end of March.

There was a discussion about implementing a test infrastructure. The following main points were:

• There is a pending project for this
• It would be nice to have an environment to test services and their clients without affecting the real ones
• If we had a test infrastructure it might be necessary to book it for a period of breakage - staging vs. tinkering
• Follow different profiles - way to test current machine profile under the develop release for example
• Just need core infrastructure (eg. DNS, Kerberos, LDAP, Cosign) as can test most other things in the existing environment
• Its easy to set up a test infrastructure (eg. scobies.net)
• Could never be an exact clone (ie. would need a separate domain, eg. test.inf.ed.ac.uk)
• We would need server virtualization to do this as we can't afford to duplicate all the necessary hardware
• Need to be careful not to do more work building a test infrastructure just to save time for a few people (as most won't need it)

Neil asked about the status of local teaching, research and environment packages for SL5. At the moment a few have been done (by auto build) but specific ones will be done quickly if requested. In the future Simon would like to see renc tools integrated with Gnome (eg. keyrings).

Neil noted that it is not possible to use Capabilities for authorization control when using iFriend accounts. He will use Plone to manage for now. Simon expects the new Account Management system to be ready for trial in Summer.

AOCB

The next meeting will be on March 26th in JCMB-2511.