Operational Meeting

Alastair, Alison, Chris, Craig, Tim

These were accepted. Ian noted that we now had a bit more information regarding problems with the MDP (sic) machines.

Pending actions:

• There are still a few outstanding "pandemic" actions to complete. Neil noted that some services-unit robustification was pending our return to AT, as ethernet bonding isn't really worthwhile on the FH network.
• A web page describing the options for removing amd from servers is imminent.
• Services-unit expect to have a plan to remove cups from servers very soon now. There was a general feeling that it would be good to try to debug what's going on, though there's often a need to get systems back into service. MPU and inf-unit have both taken cups off at least some of their servers.

Actions completed:

• IPMI v1.5 power management is now available. See the links from the inf-unit report.
• The wallet project is expected to start in the current planning period, and this will cover the preservation of ssh host keys.

The "ownership" of the jabber service will be taken to CEG.

Report from Computing Executive Group

• There was some discussion of eDiary, but it didn't come to any conclusions other than that communications had been poor.

Reports from units.

• Infrastructure.

  3. BP server room

     Until very recently there had still been some NFS moves yet to happen. Neil thought they were pretty well all done now, and it should just be a case of coordinating things with the users. Mirrors had been moved, and were gradually being added to the TiBS configuration so as not to land too big a lump of new data on the backup service in one go.

     There's one US-managed machine (bunnocks) which is tied to the SAN. It'll just have to move at the appropriate time.

     There's also still one self-managed machine.

  6. Power bar turn-on times

     The meeting reckoned that around 1 minute for the "middle" batch and 3 minutes for the "last" batch sounded about right.

     Neil asked whether the rfe on/off settings would be affected by these delays. George expected that they wouldn't (confirmed by post-meeting tests).

  7. Storage cupboard for KB server room

     This was felt to be a good idea.

• Managed Platform.

  1. updaterpms update

     Stephen asked that people should talk to the MPU before turning on the new flag.

  • Neil asked whether the /pkgs links should be revived in some other way, with the impending removal of amd. Stephen thought not, and that the /afs/... path was sufficient.

• Research and Teaching.

  2. Firefox

     It's the intention to roll out a new version of firefox over the vacation break (but not the bleeding-edge version referred to in the report!).

• Services.

  7. Jabber hardware

     It seems desirable to run the jabber service on real hardware, but the question is "where?" Given that it's tied closely to the monitoring system, it might also be better for the service to be run by the inf-unit rather than the services-unit. George will ask CEG to decide on this; and once that's done, the unit responsible will bring forward proposals for where the service actually does run.

• User Support.

Topics for discussion

There were none.

AOCB

The next Operational meeting will be on Wednesday 9th December in IF-4.31.