GridPP Technical Meeting - Migrating to EL9

Friday 14 Jun 2024, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/London

Virtual Only

Alastair Dewhurst (Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC (GB)), Andrew McNab (University of Manchester), David Colling (Imperial College (GB))

Weekly meeting slot for technical topics. We will try and focus on one topic per meeting.  We will announce at the Tuesday Ops meeting if this meeting is going ahead and if so the topic to be discussed.

# CentOS7 retirement plans and progress UK Cloud sites 

- Alastair updated status of xrootd upgrade and dns issue during last week at RAL Tier1

- UKI-LT2-QMUL: Dan:  Long 2 month downtime in july and august for migrating to EL8/EL9 | If no version of storm is available towards end of August, DAN will start investigating alternative SEs

- Imperial site: Dan whiteouse 
    - The late delivery of Apel caused us a bit of frustration, and we would still like to see source RPMs for that. We’d also like to express some concern about the content of the WLCG repo - for the example the inclusion of HTCondor which we briefly discussed in the ops meeting.

- Glasgow (SAM) - Need to move xrootd redirectors, need to be precautious
                - want to avoid the xrootd problem faced at RAL tier1 
                - WN migration ongoing, CEs are being done 
                - Storage, taking with caution, underlying CEPH going to be moved to EL8

- Vip: Oxford:  At Oxford, we are 100% complete. We are using HTCondor v23 and ARC-CE 6.19. All are servers are EL9 apart from Xcache server which is EL8.

- Rob (Liverpool)
    - Haven't migrated anything at Liverpool yet due to workload and staffing, but plans are progressing. I think other sites have migrated all the same things we need to, so we don't anticipate any blockers.
    - Dache storage, To-do
    - Batch farm, to-do as well. 
    - Background puppet infrastructure for EL9 is in place as well as tested on some machines. 
    - 

- Matt (Lancaster)
    - Lancaster is due to get rid of its last EL7 nodes in a downtime on the 27th (our redirector is on the list, left for the same reason as Glasgow).
    - GRID user data (T2k HyperK VOs)
    - Dcache EL7, no immidieate plan to move it to EL9 right away. 
    - Since UMD5 is not there, APEL can not be transitioned to EL9
        - BDII kind of a mess
            
- Discussion on UMD5
    - Alastair updated about the communication with UMD team, they say its going to come out soon. 
    - what are the alternatives and if its a right to move out of UMD or not 
    - Comments from Daniel Traynor and Chris in chat: I’m just using the direct repos for arcce, squid, cvmfs, epel (xrootd, gfal), wlcg.

- Discussions:
    -  Chris RALPP and Matt - It would be nice to have a discussion or tutorials on Networking and firewalld on EL9
    -  Alastair agrees and we can perhaps organise a meeting or discsussion focused on these. 
    -  Proposal to have a meeting about this on 12th July or before 

 

11:00 → 11:15 Remaining EL7 migrations and plans

Speaker: Alastair Dewhurst (Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC (GB))

11:15 → 11:30 Migrating to EL9 - Experiences from ...

11:30 → 11:45 Discussion

11:45 → 12:00 AoB