Site report: CERN

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Site report CERN

• Helge Meinhard (at) cern ch
• HEPiX fall 2004 _at_ BNL

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Events

• 50 years of CERN
• 29 Sep LHC ring illumination
• 16 Oct Open day at CERN 32000 visitors
• 19 Oct Official ceremony with VIPs
• CHEP Interlaken 27 Sep 01 Oct
• Record-breaking attendance more than 500
• Lot of work and lot of fun to see it all run well

3
Fabric Infrastructure and Operations (1)

• Central Data Recording in full swing
• Experiment peaks of 120 MB/s, combined average 10
  TB/day, 1.5 PB expected in 2004
• Major problem with disk server stability
• Finally whole batch, ie. 1200 disks (20 of our
  total disk count) replaced
• Many stateful servers successfully quattorised
  (J. van Eldik)
• Machine room refurbishment going on
• LHS of machine room now empty, all machines and
  services moved to RHS and vault

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Fabric Infrastructure and Operations (2)

• New machines
• 400 Farm machines being installed, alleviating
  pressure on batch farm
• Awaiting 75 disk servers (360 TB SATA, 3Ware
  9500), plus 22 disk arrays (140 TB SATA,
  Infortrend, FC attachment)
• System administration team taking over more
  specialised tasks and installations
• Legato phased out, new machine for TSM coming

6
Fabric Infrastructure and Operations (3)

• Media migration to 9940 completed, evaluations of
  new tape drives coming
• Purchasing for 20062008 becoming clearer
• Lxbatch field-proving Quattor again and again (T.
  Kleinwort)
• Preparing for LSF 6

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Architecture and Data Challenges (1)

• Worked with FNAL on SL SLC3 in final phase of
  certification
• Production-like systems for tests
• Support from RedHat started in July
• OpenLab
• Voltaire joined as contributing partner
• Project proposal on security
• Disk server studies 4-way Itanium SIAB (Storage
  In A Box), 2 x 3Ware 9500, 24 SATA disks 750
  MB/s read, 340 MB/s write, 350 MB/s read over
  10GbE (J. Iven)

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Architecture and Data Challenges (2)

• New Castor successfully tested in full chain
• OpenAFS High load on big servers revealed bugs
• CERN providing fixes to OpenAFS
• Still investigating migration to krb5
• Consolidated HEPiX scripts released

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Data Bases

• Looking at Oracle 10g
• Strong collaboration with Oracle (2 Oracle funded
  fellows in OpenLab)
• DataGuard (disaster recovery and scheduled
  upgrades)
• Oracle Streams (replication)
• Preparing for a high-availability Oracle cluster
  (RAC) running under Linux
• POOL passed real test with 400 TB of data (D.
  Duellmann)

10
Product Support (1)

• Solaris 9 certification delayed, now targeted for
  end 2004
• Moving target
• Debugging took longer than expected, as did
  writing NCM components
• Solaris will be much more in line with Linux than
  before
• Will use software from Solaris Software Companion
• Solaris security
• Certification machines compromised three times
• Awareness and requirements raised
• Considering Ipfilter, AV software, and automatic
  security updates

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Product Support (2)

• CVS services
• 100 projects, 14 GB of source code, 4 new
  projects/month
• Some servers compromised by pserver exploit
• Finer control of Web-based access required
• Monitoring migrating from UIMON to Lemon (M.
  Schröder)
• Transition to new desktop support contract
• New contractor since 01 July
• Licensing infrastructure (M. Schröder)

12
User and Document Services

• Procedure rolling for new supply contract for
  CERN desktops
• InDiCo (conference management tool) passed field
  test at CHEP with highest marks
• Cern Computer Newsletter changed
• Dedicated pages on computing in every other issue
  of CERN Courier
• More technical and CERN-specific info in online
  CNL

13
Internet Services

• Windows Terminal Server now production service
  (R. Gaspar)
• SMS 2003 client deployed everywhere (R. Otto)
• gt 100 new servers, Windows 2003 server
• Mail
• Secure (SSL) services for imap, pop, smtp as an
  option
• Accepting mail requires successful reverse DNS
  lookup and successful smtp connect
• Listbox service renewal (R. Gaspar)
• Spam fighting, Exchange 2003 (R. Otto)

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Security

• Many incidents
• Sasser worm, cvs breakin, Windows machines taken
  over by intruders, Solaris problems, lxplus root
  compromised,
• Lessons
• Tightening firewalls and patch handling
• Dual-boot machines are problematic
• Non-centrally managed machines are problematic
• Visitors laptops are very non-centrally managed
• Local Windows admin account forcefully secured by
  strong password
• Viruses arrive at CERN faster than updated
  signatures
• P2P activities often the source of problems

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Miscellaneous

• Grid Deployment moving ahead (I. Bird)
• 82 sites, 9000 CPUs in LCG2
• ACB (Automatic Call-Back) on its way out
• Call-back and 0800 numbers stopped in July
• Final switch-off end 2004
• Pilot for IP telephony
• Beam studies for the LHC à la SETI LHC_at_home
• LCG service challenges (HEPiX Edinburgh)
• LCG MoU being prepared