UK Rollout and Support Plan

1
UK Rollout and Support Plan

• Aim of this talk is to the answer question As a
  site admin, what are the steps between the
  situation today, and all interested UK sites
  being part of the Testbed.
• Definite predictions limited by uncertain nature
  of the releases.

Andrew McNab - Manchester HEP - 22 April 2002
2
Constituencies

• Sysadmins (represented in Sysman and by WP6)
• Care about the integrity of their site (firewalls
  etc) and the maintenance load of Grid Testbed
  equipment may be under pressure to get a green
  dot on the relevant map.
• Experiments (represented by GridPP EB)
• Want sites up and running for application
  development and to run data challenges. Esp.
  concerned about sites hosting their farms.
• Grid developers (represented by GridPP TB)
• Concerned about getting functionality running in
  UK, esp. at sites where experts are.
• Local HEP groups (represented on GridPP CB)
• Want a transparent process that includes everyone.

Andrew McNab - Manchester HEP - 22 April 2002
3
UK Deployment Plan

• Start with UK WP6 people ( other key experts)
• Use tb-support_at_jiscmail.ac.uk mailing list, which
  anyone can join and is archived.
• Once have some WP6 sites up and a procedure that
  should work for any site, then ask more sites to
  test installation procedure, docs etc.
• Once this has stabilised, invite all interested
  sites to install Testbed software.
• By this point, installation instuctions should be
  clear and not require previous grid experience,
  ad-hoc fixes etc.
• Support will then be provided by tb-support
  mailing list on best-effort basis and Grid
  Support Centre with a formal ticket-based system.
• (Likely that mailing list will be best place to
  get a quick answer.)
• Need to repeat this every 2 months for EDG
  releases, although not all sites may have
  commitments (eg from experiments) to do this.

Andrew McNab - Manchester HEP - 22 April 2002
4
Testbed Joining Procedure

• Procedure for joining EDG testbed is being
  defined by WP6.
• For UK sites, WP6 UK will propose sites to rest
  of WP6.
• WP6-UK will provide help with testing UK sites
• Have GridPP VO, Resource Broker and MDS so can
  add sites to UK Testbed and validate
  functionality ourselves before trying in the EDG
  Testbed.
• We dont want to propose sites without testing
  them ourselves and cautious sites can put
  themselves up for validation within GridPP
  without risking embarrassment at a European
  level.
• Will use same validation criteria as WP6.

Andrew McNab - Manchester HEP - 22 April 2002
5
Installation Procedure

• This needs to be based around LCFG because of
  complex configuration process, which is published
  as automatic LCFG configuration objects.
• Sites will almost certainly need to dedicate
  machines to be installed this way.
• LCFG itself has been non-trivial to install and
  configure.
• However, once your local LCFG server is working,
  installing CE etc is automated (similar to RedHat
  kickstart.)
• Steve has been installing LCFG at RAL and has
  written up the procedure. Also contributed
  updated scripts back to WP6. So the situation is
  much better now.

Andrew McNab - Manchester HEP - 22 April 2002
6
More information

• EDG Testbed talk from earlier today.
• WP6 website at http//marianne.in2p3.fr/
• GridPP Technical Board http//www.gridpp.ac.uk/tb/
  
• tb-support_at_jiscmail.ac.uk mailing list
• http//www.gridpp.ac.uk/tb-support/ has
• mailing list information
• Steves recipe for LCFG-installing Computing
  Element, Storage Element, User Interface machine
  and Worker Node.

Andrew McNab - Manchester HEP - 22 April 2002
7
Summary

• UK Deployment Plan largely defined
• but depends on timing and quality of EDG releases
• Testbed joining procedure defined
• aim to use UK resources to smooth path for UK
  sites to join EDG Testbed.
• Deployment to non-expert sites largely limited by
  current installation procedures
• this has improved a lot and is pretty much ready
  to go.

Andrew McNab - Manchester HEP - 22 April 2002