CTA operations

Wednesday 11 Mar 2026, 10:45 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

513/R-068 (CERN)

Julien Leduc (CERN)

This meetings covers EOSCTA service operations at CERN: minutes, community

 

Rota

• 20260225-20260304
• Repack side started to encounter some drive issues after 1 month with 20 tape drives
  • TAS could not deal with repack and CTA cannot run without TAS
    • Survives 1 month with 20 tape drives, 3 days at Run-3 production scale and only a few hours at Run-4 production scale
• Various puppet issues introduced with CTA 5.11.17 (fixed)
• 20260304-20260311

Tape infrastructure

• Spectra library drive rebalancing done:
• 20 drive in each of the 3 Spectra libraries
• ongoing tape rebalancing
• Repack is over for now until repacked tapes are removed from tape libraries

Use cases

• 2026-02-01 dysfunctional drive IBMLIB1-LTO8-F09C1R4 on CephRepack
• TAS fixes for repack scheduler separation
  • Details how TAS should deal with tapes and drives with multiple scheduler backends/instances
• Measuring and understanding library mount limits
• OTG0160118 - Tape Library SPECTRALIB2 outage
  • Lots of remounts for CMS staging because of very bad CMS collocation for example
• Future work on fair share on library mounts/dismounts per VO?
  • Starting to monitor...
• cta-admin dr rm SPECTRALIB2-LTO9-F05B4S3 crashes cta-frontend in production
• krb5 removed from main physics production frontend authentication
• 2026-03-06 Security meeting Q&A
• Honest one time snapshot for Security team with current rules to freeze start point
  • Service stack only: not targetting internal cooking or operations tools
  • Global best practices to be agreed to improve rules after

AOBs

• 2026-03-12 Idris will present ctaops SDK and tools at CTA dev meeting
• 2026-03-16 Anhelina will present Improving CTA write efficiency at CMS Computing week (room 6/2-024)
• 2026-03-17 10:30/12:00 9th CERN Service Management Forum / 9ᵉ Forum "CERN Service Management"
• New UI, new reporting tool, introducing AI for 1st level support