Speaker
M. ZUREK
(CERN, IFJ KRAKOW)
Description
The talk presents the experience gathered during the testbed
administration (~100 PC and 15+ switches) for the ATLAS Experiment at
CERN.
It covers the techniques used to resolve the HW/SW conflicts, network
related problems, automatic installation and configuration of the
cluster nodes as well as system/service monitoring in the heterogeneous
dynamically changing cluster environment.
Techniques range from manual actions to the fully automated procedures
based on tools like Kickstart, SystemImager, Nagios, MRTG and
Spectrum. Booting diskless nodes using EtherBoot, PXEboot is also
investigated as a possible technique of managing Atlas Production
Farms.
Kernel customization techniques (building, deploying, distribution
policy) allow users to freely choose proffered kernel flavors without
sysadmin intervention. At the same time administrator retains full
control over entire testbed.
The overall experience has shown that the proper use of the
open-source tools addresses very well the needs of the ATLAS Trigger
DAQ community. This approach may also be interesting for addressing
certain aspects of GRID Farm Management.
Primary author
M. ZUREK
(CERN, IFJ KRAKOW)
