Linux Working Group Agenda

Meeting Date

• Friday February 12th, 2pm in DC 2314

Attendees

• Dawn Keenan, Guoxiang Shen, Stephen Nickerson, Fraser Gunn, Lawrence Folland, Ronaldo Garcia

Agenda

• setup to ensure consistency of xhier packages in a region or group
  • current practice on Linux servers is to deliberately exclude all admin, regional requests and manually add packages to local requests as needed
    • manual work to maintain consistent environment: add new servers to a group, take a server out for temporary maintenance and ensure all software available on all servers in the region
    • recommendation from discussions among Bill, Dave, Dawn to either
      • use admin, regional requests normally and only provide packages required on the relevant arch master, or
      • have an arch-specific "exclude these packages" list for admin/arch and region/arch conflicts
  • Guoxiang suggests that the way it's been done is to use only local requests and then manually install packages desired
    • add file to regional requests
  • what packages do we actually need under xhier?
    • accounts, Maple, Matlab
    • sometimes packages that are available at a newer release of Ubuntu than we have on a given machine

• setup to ensure consistency of Debian packages in a region or group
  • great difference amongst the machines that are currently in the teaching environment
    • have had to manually update machines and repeat
  • suggestions, ideas ?
    • some configuration managers out there: cfengine, puppet
  • possibility of leveraging xhier structure
    • create Xhier package of a list of Debian "super" packages (eg: MySQL, but not list all of its dependencies)
    • issues of uninstalling Xhier packages, when including Debian packages
      • current wrapper uninstalls everything, installs package, then re-installs everything
  • procedures, tools required
  • USG working on list of software packages on teaching servers and then replicate on core environment

• status of current work in student environment
  • Ubuntu 8
    • front-end servers and cpu servers (1 - cpu06)
    • every Thursday night Marmoset server falls over
    • would like to have another CPU server added to the environment this term
    • Marmoset can be load-balanced, but there is only 1 Linux machine
    • cpu04 being worked on by Dave? - can someone else work on it? ST#70441
  • workstation support
    • Graphics Lab - latest cards not recognized under 8.04, but does under 9.10
    • others awaiting deployment: SE lab, former Nortel lab
    • consultant working on timeout issues during GUI login, secure mounting of $HOME
• time line for student, core Ubuntu 9 "fully supported" rollout (server and workstation)
  • want to have a fully-functional student environment Ubuntu 9 a month ahead of the first lectures of Spring Term
    • ie: April 1, 2010 ("brick wall deadline!")
  • no Ubuntu 9 machine currently available, need one ASAP
  • what hardware is assigned for the project? - Dave?
    • Dawn will check with Dave for getting a sandbox system for new Ubuntu 9.10
    • maybe just get a basic PC to use: Fraser to help Guoxiang get setup
    • new workstations for Graphics Lab evergreening are available

• status of Active Directory usage for Ubuntu 9
  • can't be completely on the AD because cannot abandon Solaris
    • may need to continue to force password updates on Solaris 8 servers or use new web interface

• password migration unix -> passwords
  • issues with inconsistent rules between unix and AD, plus Nexus/WatIAM