Virtualisation hassles

Got a shiny new Dell Optiplex 740 (AMD 64 X2 goodness) that I wanted to run request-tracker in a VM on. Installed ubuntu gutsy fine, Installed Xen fine, just wouldn't correctly boot any domU's to completion. I even tried out KVM seeing as it's new hardware that has the 'svm' flags in /proc/cpuinfo. That failed miserably at the modprobe kvm_amd stage with kvm: disabled by bios. Most odd as there wasn't a bios option for v12n[1]. However I (after much hassle finding a bootable flopy) upgraded from 1.1.3 to 1.2.2 BIOS and lo - xen 'Just Works'

it's actually scarily easy to do - "xen-create-image --hostname whatever" and you're off :-)

More postings as I get to grips with this. Initial impressions are good.

cfengine gotcha

Not strictly gridpp, but posting this here may save an administrator some sanity...

I've just spent the day battling against ubuntu on a lab cluster. The server had successfully upgraded from Feisty (7.04) to Gutsy (7.10) and cfengine refused to work. At all. It was only a minor upgrade in cfengine too - 2.1.20 to 2.1.22.

cfagent -qv -d2 hung - even with debugging on cfservd nothing obvious. Finally got a tip on IRC (freenode.net #cfengine) that it's likely to be a Berkeley DB upgrade thats the problem. Blew away all the .db files from state/ (and the __something.db that I found lying around in the cfengine dir too). tada! much stress reduced.

Feed Me!

At todays dteam meeting, there was a discussion about informing the PMB of any significant changes to the infrastructure. As the standard SOP is to use the EGEE Broadcast tool on the CIC portal, it'd be nice if there was say an RSS feed that we could parse and extract UKI significant info into say the planet feed. Anyone care to add comments?

RAL Network performance

Prior to running any transfer tests, I normally check the Gridmon plots for that site, the relevant T2 and RAL T1. Using the (non-default) options of 'Metric data on same graph" and "New graph on new test dest" (and "new test src"), you generally get a good feel for the sites capacity, and any 'slow' links associated with it. Sadly recently the Tier1 seems to be performing dreadfully WRT the other sites.
example to Glasgow from Durham, Edinburgh and RAL:

Q3 Transfer Tests

OK, new quarter and time to get down to some testing as I'm well overdue. First up - Lancaster. Apart from some user error at this end (typo in script) it went pretty smoothly and can cope with 25 files in flight happily:

ganglia plot from Glasgow end:

showing 10,15,20,25 file setting in transfer channel

I've also started the Oxford tests, but it seems to be much less happy - When transferring from RAL-T2, even at low nos of files (5) the CPU load on t2se01 seems awfy awfy high.


Hmm. Have mailed Pete, but something doesn't look happy...

Corporate Makeover

Thanks to Neasan O'Neill, the Planet GridPP page now has a shiny new stylesheet to match the main GridPP site.

planet.gridpp.ac.uk

I'd been trialling planet, the RSS aggregator for a few months now, and I'm fairly pleased with it. So much so that it's now official :-)

http://planet.gridpp.ac.uk should now show you, in a single place all the various Tier-2, operations and storage blogs. If there are any others that people want adding, drop me a note.