Speaker
Mr
Alessandro Italiano
(INFN-CNAF)
Description
Every day operations on a big computer center farm like that of a Tier1 can be numerous. Opening or closing a
host, changing batch system configuration, replacing a disk, reinstalling a host and so on, is just a short list of
what can and will really happen. In these conditions remembering all that has been done could be really difficult.
Typically a big farm is managed by a team so it can happen to forget which operations have been performed by
some other colleague; in the worst case, one could be completely unaware about the changes.
There is therefore a real need to keep trace as much as possible of all operations on the cluster in order to have
the farm status under full control.
With a tool like “Farm Logbook”, developed and deployed at the INFN Tier-1, you can easily track down
information about events occurred in the past or ongoing. All information are obtained in an automatic way in
order to avoid consistency problems due to someone missing updates. The technologies used to develop this tool,
such as CVS, MySQL, PHP, AJAX and RSS, provide smart access to this information in order to grant anytime to
farm administrators a realistic snapshot of the cluster. Potentially therefore this tool can improve farm
management and troubleshooting.
Author
Mr
Alessandro Italiano
(INFN-CNAF)
