SLC5 "minimal configuration"

Tuesday 22 Jul 2008, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/Zurich

28/S-029 (CERN)

What do we want as minimal configuration on SLC5.

Matthias slides AboutPackageSelection.pdf AboutPackageSelection.ppt

Present: Matthias Schroder, Jan van Eldik, Peter Kelemen, Dan Dengate, Ricardo Silva, Ulrich Schwickerath, Jan Iven, Arne Wielback, Veronique Lefebure (chair and minutes)

Excused: Steve Straylen, Miguel Anjo

• Presentation: (see slides) Matthias presented how he defines package lists for the Linux For Control CDBs, based on the comps.xml provided by Redhat:
  • there are 62 groups (package-lists), starting from "core" and "base".
  • they are created with a home-made script
  • What is installed on quattor-managed machines should be a good balance between what is needed or nice to have, and the maintenance effort for keeping the software up-to-date
  • we may need close to everything on lxplus, but much less on disk servers or on afs servers. ->Service Managers should be able to select which package lists they want on their cluster. We have to identify what will go on _all_ clusters.
• Discussion:
  • Uli: VOBOX already use what is called a "minimal" installation. People are happy with it. The aim is to have at some point a tool that let users select what they want on top of that minimal installation, by adding either "addons" templates (=small list of packages for a well defined purpose) or "service" templates (= templates that configure packages + application configuration and monitoring)
  • Jan I: comps.xml files are not very widely used -> no mechanism to keep them uptodate
  • Jan vE: how are 32bit package lists handled on 64bit arch. boxes ? Matthias: one has to create the needed lists as well.
  • We would have one list per group, per OS, per arch. They have to be used in combination with the "default" templates (as we are doing now). We can still keep a "_cc" default template for everything which is not provided by LinuxSoft, in order to force versions of packages to be uniform on all platforms.
• Agreements:
  • we will use the package lists provided by Matthias, on SLC5
  • we will take "base" as the base for all clusters (in addition to the usual "quattor_base" and "lemon_base" packages).
  • lxdev (for example) will have in addition the "sw development" package list
  • packagelist templates will
    • resides under /os/<arch>_<os>/rpms</os></arch>
    • be documented in the header of the templates themselves
    • be owned by someone
      
    • be updated during scheduled software upgrades
    • if needed, their content can be discussed for changes on project-elfms mailing list: if a new package is needed, it will be decided if it is cluster-specific, or has to be added to one package-list
• AOB: Jarek said 10 days ago that SLC5 packages currently available on SWREP need to be refreshed. Jan Iven will take care of that. It is not an issue because we don't have so many boxes on slc5 yet. They will need to be reinstalled for consistency.