Operational Meeting

Minutes of the meeting held on Wednesday 27th January 2010
Room 4-31, Informatics Forum

Present:: Ross Armstrong, Toby Blake, Lindsey Brown, Roger Burroughes, Tim Colles, Chris Cooke, Alison Downie (Convenor and minutes), Ian Durkacz, Graham Dutton, Stephen Quinney, Iain Rae, Gordon Reid, George Ross, Craig Strachan

Apologies for absence
Alastair, Neil
Minutes of the last meeting.
These were accepted.
Actions.
Actions completed:
- The new query tools (as per RAT report for 13/01) have been tested.
- Toby has added details on how to use kerberised ssh on supported OSs to the AFS FAQ.
- Best use of temperature monitoring will be covered by one of Chris's projects.
Actions added:
- MPU to consider possibility/implication of periodic file reconfiguration.
- US to reconfigure ex-mars machine to ensure root partition on large disk.
Report from Computing Executive Group
Reports from units.
- Infrastructure.
- Forum power bars
  Note that the Infrastructure Unit propose making the default outlet state for the Forum power bars be OFF. You have until the next Operational Meeting (10th February) to make sure that the outlets for all your servers are properly configured.
- Managed Platform.
- Research and Teaching.
  1. Firefox URL Classifier
    It was noted that we might turn the classifier back on at some point.
- Services.
  As mentioned at the meeting, Craig sent out an e-mail with an explanation of the recent problems. A more detailed explanation for those who are interested will be posted on blob.inf shortly.
  We discussed whether all file servers should be ext2. It was agreed that this would cause problems should the server go down as the subsequent fsck would take hours. The possibilities of moving to ext4 and replacing raid5 with raid10 were also mentioned along with removing journalling from all rw volumes.
- User Support.
- FH move Much of the kit remaining at FH is managed by the US unit. However, we will need some help in moving other kit!
Topics for discussion
- Periodic file reconfiguration
  The question was whether there is any reason not to run om file configure nightly, to repair (for example) badly behaved RPMs ? It was felt that this could just 'patch over' bad packages and potentially mask updaterpm problems. So, it was suggested that the MPU unit should give this some further consideration.
AOCB
It was noted that the ex-mars machines have a very small disk and one larger disk. The root partition is currently on the small disk. Support will reconfigure one of them by using the larger disk for the root partition.
Next meeting
The date and time of the next operational meeting will be announced shortly.

: Operational : Meetings

Please contact us with any comments or corrections.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all material is copyright The University of Edinburgh

Operational Meeting

Minutes of the meeting held on Wednesday 27th January 2010 Room 4-31, Informatics Forum

Minutes of the meeting held on Wednesday 27th January 2010
Room 4-31, Informatics Forum