| Task: | King's Buildings-specific legacy system issues |
| Group: | iain |
| Stage: | 1 |
Description
This report deals with issues that are specific to legacy sytems at
King's Buildings.
This is an even less rough draft :)
Report changes
- 2002-03-03
- some things clarified, radical proposal from Alastair
- 2002-02-17
- Added comments recieved from gdmr, added some more of my own and started to build up a list of actions.
As we will be the first site implementing DICE and are already migrating off of Solaris most of the legacy support is likely to be transitional, unfortunately this does not make things any easier.
Issues
The following issues are partly covered by stage 1+ tasks but need to be considered in the interim.
Backups
The legacy backup system should still be sufficient for any legacy servers and also for the home directory servers but do we want or are we going to need to allow unkerberised access to DICE machines (it looks like moondog and marmion are the only hosts that might be effected, everything else has local tape drives).
We may have to upgrade amanda to handle the Ultrium tapes, if we're having to do this should we bump up the backups task and just get on with it?
We will continue to use the legacy backup systems for legacy machines. Backup of DICE machines is being spawned off to a separate task.
Security wise is there anything that's being stored on a users home directory that we shouldn't be archiving (any temp kerberos files?) same question applies to /yesterday.
No
Applications at Kings Buildings
Need to get a list of applications which are currently running under Solaris and confirm any that can't be ported. Do we wean users off of these apps and if so how long do we need to continue to support them (this is a hardware/maintenence issue as well)
Console servers
The new console servers use ssh to build a secure connection to the server. We should be able to access consoles from both DICE and legacy systems independantly of what the console server is running. How conserver is dicified is an issue for another day.
The following are Solaris based systems
Routers/firewalls
Lewis and Harris are running ipfilters as perimeter firewalls for dcs we may transition to ipchains/iptables/ipthemeofthemonth at some point but we need to support these two suns in the legacy world for the time being.
NFS fileservers
Even when the new inf fileservers come into commission we will have to maintain NFS servers for legacy systems. How many and what kind? Probably won't know until it happens.
SLI machines
I need to Liase with Neil about what he needs for the SLI machines.
I need to get a list of acronyms for the division.
The following are Linux based systems that will not be DICED as part of stage 1
Denhaag Samba server for the admin staff windows PC's does this get DICED or not?
yes, provided that it doesn't break samab which it shouldn't.
What happens about www.dcs.ed.ac.uk?
www.dcs.ed.ac.uk stays as is until it becomes a virtual server on the inf.ed.ac.uk server.
Supporting Issues
- We need to provide a way of seeding NIS maps from DICE LDAP.
- Do we try to run LCFG(ng) and LCFG(TOS) as separate systems or feed TOS from NG?No, LCFG(TOS) stays as is until the SUNS die off or are replaced by some Division^w School wide supported system
- We may have to fork the development of some objects/components as
We probably have to do care and maintenance of some of the Solaris objects whilst these systems are still in service, this is going to get more painful as time goes on.
- Hesiod, since this disappears in DICE does it disappear in legacyworld? either way we need to integrate the maps for /legacy somehow.No user access to /legacy so hesiod stays as is.
- To what extent will self managed hosts be affected? Is there anything we need to deal with beyond network issues?There shouldn't be any issues with self managed machines.
Dial up annex
The current dial up annex is not going to be compatible with DICE and will need upgrading or ( more probably) junking.
Radical proposal
How widely used are the SUNS, if we can migrate users off of the suns then we can run a stripped down setup on them and limit access to support staff only, in which case lots of things go away.
Usernames
Since all usernames will switch to EUCS usernames when dice comes we may as well start ASAP. Undergraduates can be done en mass at the end of the year, staff and PG's we should encourage to change before say 1 july.
This has implications on web pages and email (the postgrads will automatically get their mail forwarded to sms when they get their sXXXX accounts and we need to generate aliases for them as the transition happens.
Software
Status of Software currently being used on the SUNs is indicated below.
Software Ported to DICE
| Software. |
Comments. |
| eddir | Search for a name in the Edinburgh mail directory. This still relies on files mounted from the SUNS
|
Software which needs to be checked and ported if required/possible
| Software |
Comments |
| ivtools (idraw etc) | available under 6.2 but not 7.x |
| detex | Compiles under 7.x ok, needs to be packaged |
| dlx | It was run 17 times in july last year, is it still being used? |
| hase | ??????? |
| matlab | Convert licence to run on something else, do we keep license?We don't use maple on the suns up here and the licenses are long gone. |
| ocaml | exists in 6.2 but not in 7.1 |
| spim | used once in the last 12 months |
Software not available under Linux
| Software |
Comments |
| distill | Freeware tools are not as good, there is a commercial linux server version available but costly. This software is also used at other site(s).
|
Summary
Timescales
Dependencies
LDAP, Filesystems, Networking, Accounts creation/Management, probably most of them actually
Actions
Current
- 2002-02-19
- Generate list of hosts which may be affected by backup issues (i.e. linux clients which will becomes diced) Completed:none
- 2002-03-5
- figure out what information we need to pull out of LDAP and dump into NIS
Completed
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