DICE Meeting 2002-04-02

Agenda

1. Corrections to minutes
2. Actions Arising from minutes of meeting of 2002-03-19
3. Review of Tasks

Decisions

1. PhD UIDs: Where PhDs have UIDs (typically old accounts) that are not from the allocated student range we will not be altering them to conform
2. Filesystem names These need to be defined standardly and a single component will add symlinks as required (corrected as per meeting of 2002-04-16).

Actions

• actions carried forward from previous meetings
• actions not under the Review of Tasks section.
• actions from Review of Tasks section that involves someone outside the task.

1. Actions Arising: CEG to discuss machine purchase mechanism. (noted 2002-02-19) Carried forward
   [Alastair/Jeremy/Ken]
2. Actions Arising: List of modules to be published is in progress (noted 2002-02-19). Carried forward
   [Gordon]
3. Actions Arising: Use of XDM and issues of speeding up deployment of DICE (noted 2002-03-05). Carried forward.
   [CEG]
4. Actions Arising: Deployment tasks to notify Alison about types of documents (noted 2002-03-05). Ongoing.
   [All deployment tasks 'owners']
5. Actions Arising: local site deployment publicity required.
   [Alastair/Jeremy/Ken]
6. Actions Arising: UUNs: Site managers to arrange to contact users who will need to change their username to warn them
   [Alastair/Jeremy/Ken]
7. Actions Arising: Arrange various cross-group technical meetings. (noted 2002-03-19). Carried forward.
   [Alastair]
8. Sponsors: feedback on how DB will hold sponsor information
   [Ken]
9. Sponsors: note this task in relevant task document
   [Jeremy]
10. UUN queries: check that UUNs really are unique;
    [Alastair/Ken/Jeremy]
11. MIS feed: check about getting data direct
    [Neil]
12. converting UUN users: look into redirect back from @inf to legacy.
    [Morna]
13. Infrastructure: update tasks list for task renamed to infrastructure.
    [Jeremy]
14. @informatics: write case for @inf and suggest to Mike
    [Jeremy]
15. Publicity: mailshot to be sent out with common change information.
    [Jeremy]
16. Quotas: these need to be discussed.
    [Neil/Roger/Bill/John/Iain]
17. Timetable: provide more detailed schedule for the summer.
    [Jeremy]

Minutes

1. Corrections to minutes of 2002-03-19

   None were noted.

2. Actions arising from minutes of last meeting (2002-03-5)
   1. Actions Arising: CEG to discuss machine purchase mechanism. (noted 2002-02-19) [Alastair/Jeremy/Ken]
      Carried forward
   2. Actions Arising: List of modules to be published. (noted 2002-02-19). Gordon has started to create this list but further work is required.[Gordon]
      Carried forward
   3. Reports/LCFG technology: All maintainers of LCFG components should do a minimum conversion. [All component maintainers].
      Action migrated into report
   4. Provide revised report layout and any special HTML format requirements. [Jeremy].
      Done
   5. Actions Arising: Use of XDM and issues of speeding up deployment of DICE. [CEG].

      This have been discussed at CEG and the view is that we may be able to complete the changeover to DICE by Summer 2003. It is still being discussed though.

      Carried forward
   6. The auto-generated test page has received feedback and comments will be incorporated. [Alison].
      Done
   7. Actions Arising: Deployment tasks need to notify Alison what types of documents they will be producing. [All deployment tasks 'owners'].
      Ongoing
   8. Reports/Kerberos: New accounts are needed and a full set using EUCS unique usernames is being worked on. Mail Simon if you want to enable access to your account while Tim is away. Although most of the milestones listed in the new progress pages are done this is for a test system; more needs to be done to make this a production system. [Tim]
      Done
   9. Reports/Networks: Work is being done on components and filters. The report is about to get a major re-write.[George]
      Done
   10. Reports/Config Editor: There is a possible bottleneck over rfe because of the load on Simon. Paul to discuss it with Simon. This has been partially resolved. [Paul/Simon]
       Done
   11. Actions Arising: DICE deployment publicity: Site managers should make sure that this publicity is provided. [Alastair/Jeremy/Ken]
       Ongoing
   12. Actions Arising: Conversion of accounts to UUN: Site managers should contact those users who will need to change their username to warn them again of the need for the change and should arrange for a list of things to change/look out for. [Alastair/Jeremy/Ken]
       Ongoing and see discussion below
   13. Arrange various cross-group technical meetings. [Alastair]
       Ongoing
3. Accounts, UUNs, associate accounts, etc:

   There are quite a few issues relating to new accounts, allocation of unique user names (UUN), creation of accounts for associates and converting of existing accounts to UUNs.

   • There will be a general purge of existing accounts
   • There will be many users associated with the Division (internal and external to the University) who will need accounts under DICE. We should:
     • make sure that we know who their sponsors are and that they are noted (in the database) before we get new accounts created for them. This information will have to be collated by each site. Ken will provide feedback on how the DB will hold this.
       [ACTION: Ken]
     • mail all associates warning them that they will be getting new accounts under DICE and that their username may change.
     • we will need to apply for UUNs for these accounts. For users within the University they should already have UUNs so we need to avoid getting duplicates created.
     • this should get noted/documented in the User Account Transitional Arrangements task
       [ACTION: Jeremy]
   • Some PhDs will already have UIDs that are not in the standard student range. We will not be bothering to alter them to conform.
   • There are concerns that the list of current users who have to change is incomplete as there are some users with popular names who apparently will be retaining them despite there being multiple instances of <user> in different domains within the University. (eg bill, toby). Site service managers need to get these checked.
     [ACTION: Alastair/Jeremy/Ken]

     Neil will also look into getting a direct feed of MIS information by talking to David Lowrie.

     [ACTION: Neil]
   • Paul has already gone through the process of converting to his UUN under DCS.. He'll send round notes detailing issues noted so far. It was noted that
   • Users who have to change their UUN may want to do so now but it would be nice if we could accommodate them using an @inf address and redirect this temporarily to their legacy domain. This needs to be looked into further.
     [ACTION: Morna]

4. Infrastructure task

   The existing task for install, configuration and software distribution will be renamed to be an infrastructure task and used to coordinate core infrastructure issues. This will now include other members: George, Iain, Neil. Jeremy to update documents accordingly

   [ACTION: Jeremy]
5. Machines for installation

   There are machines available from Alastair for installation and testing so people should not be held up for this reason. Contact Alastair.

6. informatics name

   Despite the Policy Committee decision of 3 years ago to use the full @informatics for mail, there are good reasons why the default host/mail domain/realm name should all be inf. The recommendation is that the short form gets used where possible (eg outgoing mail headers) although the full name will be accepted for incoming mail. Jeremy to write a summary of the issues/justification and forward to Mike Fourman asking where this should be taken for ratification.

   [ACTION: Jeremy]
7. Review of tasks

   The core tasks were considered, in no particular order.

   Authorisation

   client end working, needs netgroup stuff to be added. Changing primary roles will be via rfe, secondary roles by some other route.

   Filesystem Maps/Issues

   George will be testing the recently released amd patches very soon.

   Names of locations referring to non-composite mount points can be altered by symlink under the control of components but a default list of standard locations needs to be decided.

   [ACTION: George/Bill/Alastair]

   Common Home Directories (CHD)

   The issues over group unification need to be finalised (eg for current requirement to export a cogsci user's homedir to a non-DICE LCFG machine (but not as a CHD).

   [ACTION: Roger]

   Networks

   All DICE machines should use wire-m at the moment. The network cards to be used have VLAN-aware drivers and these seem to working fine. Transit routers will be built in due course.

   Kerberos

   No major issues. It needs to be rebuilt to use b-tree rather than hash indexes as the s<matric> entries cause the index to be very ineffecient as there as so many similar values (with the first two digits being the year)

   LDAP

   There are stability issues and the openLDAP 2.1 alpha is going to be used. The recent corruption of data has been fixed.

   LCFG

   There are adaptor rewrites going on for spanning map handling

   LCFG looks like the place where host information should be coming from to populate LDAP, using spanning maps. There may be a requirement for host roles information as well (eg mounting of filesystems, restricted access). Paul to investigate.

   [ACTION: Paul]

8. Publicity

   Apart from what site managers need to do that is specific to sites, users need to be told about the common changes that will be happening under DICE (eg, common home directories, filesystem changes, students moving to SMS, etc). A regular mailshot of information backed up by further info on the website seems like the best way to go.

   [ACTION: Jeremy]
9. Hand-waving issues

   There are still areas where we haven't pinned down how we are going to implement things, partly on the assumption that another task or area has responsibility. It is really important that these get flagged so action on everyone to raise any doubts or concerns about their assumptions

   [ACTION: All]
   Quotas
   There needs to be a meeting of those involved in tasks that have an impact on quotas, either usage of or relating to quota configuration data. Quotas may get used in multiple instances (eg home, web and mail dirs).
   [ACTION: Neil/Roger/Bill/John/Iain]
10. Timetable

    The timetable for summer deployment needs to be more detailed.

    [ACTION: Jeremy]

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