Operations Bulletin Latest

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Bulletin archive


Week commencing Monday 5th February 2018
Task Areas
General updates

Monday 5th February

  • Chris B: IPv6 and Data Transfer Zones.
  • Steve’s & Duncan’s view on GridPP IPv6 enablement
  • Sites are now being ticketed in respect of Meltdown/Spectre. EGI overview page has been updated.
  • EGI (Operations Broadcast of 2nd February)
    • NGIs argus servers to update
    • webdav probes in the ARGO_MON_OPERATORS monitoring profile
    • UMD 4.6.0 regular release
  • WLCG VOBOX available for CentOS/EL7
  • Rod Tickets and Broken Tests
  • 14th IEEE E-Sicence conference which will be held in Amsterdam in October 2018. There is one session on Exascale Computing for High Energy Physics, see the Call for Contribution tab in the conference page.


Tuesday 30th January

  • WLCG Monday operations meeting minutes are available.
  • John/Liverpool: WAN woes.
  • Kashif: DPM upgrade and migration to CS7. Are there any summary pages?
  • Ivan: CPU comparisons/benchmarks - Xeon 6126, Xeon 6130, Xeon E5-2683v4, EPYC 7501. Is this page up-to-date for your site?
  • Tom/Catalin investigating "confidential" CVFMS software repository on the RAL Stratum 0.

Monday 22nd January

  • There is a GDB on 10th January. Agenda.
  • The CHEP2018 abstract submissions deadline has been extended until January 15 2018.
  • VAC wide cert issue.
  • Vulnerability discussions.
  • CMS requirement for Singularity on worker nodes by March 2018. CMS plans to include the SAM Singularity probe in the critical profile in March.
  • Matt: xrdcp permission denied errors with a CA flavour.
  • WLCG-HSF Naples Workshop - Monday 26 March at 9am to Thursday 29 March at 12 noon.
  • 8th Jan Cloud workshop details.
  • EGI IGTF CA update, version 1.89-1
  • SoLid experiment recently started data taking. More sites to provide CPU would be welcomed. VO is in portal.
  • There will be a February pre-GDB 2nd Febraury on HPC utilisation and another on 13th February on GPU Utilisation. The GDB is on 14th.
  • There is a proposal for a new HEPiX WG on Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN). It will be more research oriented and aims to bring together people interested in networking R&D for HEP.


WLCG Operations Coordination - AgendasWiki Page

Monday 29th January

  • The majority of T1 sites and VOs confirmed that they do use SAM tests from the critical profiles and regularly check A/R reports.

Suggestions for improvements:

    • Propose policy for accepting A/R recalculation requests. The draft should be reviewed at the next meeting.
    • VO should have flexibility in the definition of the critical profile. Though the impact of the changes in the critical profile should be carefully tested by the VO and should be announced in advance to the sites, no approval of the MB is required.
    • Make tests as close as possible to the real production flow. ATLAS is planning some work in this direction.
    • The proposal to include real production flows in the critical profile was not supported.
    • Sites which do have local fabric monitoring like Nagios for example, are recommended to use an API to import test results into the local fabric monitoring. **This would help to avoid test failures staying unnoticed for months.
    • Transparent navigation from the SAM UI to the log files is required to facilitate test failure debugging. This feature has to be preserved in the new SAM UI being developed by the monitoring team.


Tuesday 23rd January

  • There was a WLCG ops coordination meeting on 18th January.
  • Theere was a theme of SAM tests and their use in WLCG reporting. The short summary is that there is overwhelming support for use of SAM tests for operational benefits but there is often a gap between the SAM reports and experiment perceptions of site performance. One major concern was the effort required to recompute results given the number of requests where sites are trying to show even small improvements in their performance to their management/funders. A more useful measure would include a reference to job accounting. A proposal will be made to the MB. GridPP may make a statement to the WLCG MB regarding our management use.


Tier-1 - Status Page

Tuesday 6th February Report from the last Tier1 - Experiments Liaison Meeting at on 31st January is here.

  • There were problems with the Atlas Castor instance. The Atlas stager database became fragmented and one of its tables was rebuilt overnight 23/24 Jan. Since then the Atlas Castor instance has operated normally.
  • There was a problem with the system that runs the tape library control software overnight Wed/Thu (24/25 Jan). Staff were called late Wednesday evening but were unable to get the system up then. Overnight we were unable to mount tapes - effectively blocking tape access (although writes to the disk buffers in front of tape, plus reads of any data in those buffers, carried on). The fault on the server was resolved Thursday morning and normal tape service resumed.
  • There is a problem on one of the BMS (Building Management System) in the R89 machine room that has had an intermittent fault. Work is ongoing to look at how to replace the faulty board in the system while ensuring the cooling carries on OK.
  • The upgrade of Echo to the next version of CEPH ("Luminous") was completed during the week leading up to 26th Jan.
  • ALICE and LHCb VOBOXes are now dual stack IPv4/6.
  • The Hyper-K VO has been enabled on the batch farm.
  • Atlas have moved their FTS transfers from our "test" FTS service to the Production one. This change was made at our request and effectively consolidates us with a single production FTS service.
Storage & Data Management - Agendas/Minutes

Wed 06 Dec

  • Another success story - CERN@School running machine learning at QMUL
  • Technical events coming up - hepsysman and cloud workshop at Crick. We ought to do something Useful or Interesting.

Wed 15 Nov

  • More xcache progress at some sites; less at others who may be blocking on dependencies or be busy with Other Things(tm)
  • Some interest in following the non-X.509 authentication/authorisation

Wed 08 Nov

  • Not (very) modest at all progress on xcache testing... from Chris at RALPP

Wed 01 Nov

  • (very) modest progress on xcache testing...
  • Except that RALPP has it fully working for dCache - hope to get full report next week


Tier-2 Evolution - GridPP JIRA

Tuesday 12 Dec

  • Vcycle updated for Glance API 2.0 and to support Vacuum Pipe VM definitions.

Tuesday 14 Nov

  • Single processor LHCb stoppable Monte Carlo VMs running in a mixture with fixed length 8 processor ATLAS VMs and single processor GridPP VMs. Please get in touch if you are running Vac and want to try this.



Accounting - UK Grid Metrics HEPSPEC06 Atlas Dashboard HS06

Tuesday 6th February


Tuesday 30th January

Tuesday 24th Oct


Monday 16th January

  • The discussion topic for next week will be accounting comparisons. Please note Alessandra's comments last week.

Monday 14th November

  • Alessandra has written an FAQ to extract numbers from ATLAS and APEL avoiding the SSB.

Monday 26th September

  • A problem with the APEL Pub and Sync tests developed last Tuesday and was resolved on Wednesday. This had a temporary impact on the accounting portal.
Documentation - KeyDocs

Tuesday 22nd Jan 2018

CHANGE TO APPROVED VOs

  • New Approved VO

A VO, solidexperiment.org, has been included in the GridPP Approved VOs document. Sites are requested to support this experiment, resources permitting.

https://www.gridpp.ac.uk/wiki/GridPP_approved_VOs#Approved_Local_VOs

  • In the Ops Portal, LHCb mentions a new cvmfs mount, /cvmfs/lhcb-condb.cern.ch
  • A voms server for magic, voms02.pic.es, has an updated DN.

Tuesday 9th Jan 2018 Changes to Approved VOs.

a) VOMS servers for planck, ipv6.hepix.org and enmr are now restored to as they were before the flooding at CNAF. b) The DN of a VOMS server for magic has changed.

https://www.gridpp.ac.uk/wiki/GridPP_approved_VOs

Tuesday 5th Sept 2017

New Approved VO. SKA European regional data centre, skatelescope.eu

https://www.gridpp.ac.uk/wiki/GridPP_approved_VOs

This VO is ramping up and has requested support. Andrew McNab is the contact person for GridPP.

General note

See the worst KeyDocs list for documents needing review now and the names of the responsible people.

Interoperation - EGI ops agendas Indico schedule

Tuesday 30th January

Tuesday 23rd January

  • There was an EGI Operations Meeting last Monday: Agenda
  • Middleware
    • Long list of updates in UMD 4.6
    • UMD3 deprecation - start using UMD4 as soon as possible
    • Products missing, let them know - this is a heads up
  • Operations
    • New weights in A/R
    • "Several sites are still missing the necessary information for computing the weights: check on VAPOR the values published by your sites in order to properly publishing in the GLUE2 schema the number of logical CPUs and the Hep-Spec06 benchmark."
    • http://operations-portal.egi.eu/vapor/resources/GL2ResSummary
    • IPv6
    • https://wiki.egi.eu/w/index.php?title=IPV6_Assessment
    • webdav probes in production
    • "During the January OMB we are going to discuss the inclusion of the probes in the operators and in the critical profile" [may be superceded]
    • Storage accounting deployment
    • "IMPORTANT: be sure to have installed the star-accounting.py script v1.0.4"
Monitoring - Links MyWLCG

Tuesday 4th July

  • There were a number of useful links provided in the monitoring talks at the WLCG workshop in Manchester - especially those in the Wednesday sessions.

Monday 13th February

  • This category is pretty much inactive. Are there any topics under "monitoring" that anyone wants reported at this ops meeting? If not we will remove this section from the regular updates area of the bulletin and just leave the main links.

Tuesday 1st December


Tuesday 16th June

  • F Melaccio & D Crooks decided to add a FAQs section devoted to common monitoring issues under the monitoring page.
  • Feedback welcome.


On-duty - Dashboard ROD rota

Monday 29th January

  • There were a couple of alarms which showed up on the dashboard, but not on the corresponding nagios.
  • DB got fed up with Imperial failing the job-cancel test for CREAM -- the CE is just busy and returns the cancelled state about 30 s after the test 'fails' -- so she filed a ticket questioning the usefulness of the test: https://ggus.eu/?mode=ticket_info&ticket_id=133004.

Monday 20th November

  • Generally quiet. There are three outstanding tickets: low availability at Birmingham, one at Liverpool which might just have gone green, and out-of-date IGTF CAs at Sheffield.
Rollout Status WLCG Baseline

Monday 20th November



Historical References


Security - Incident Procedure Policies Rota

Tuesday 6th February on 2018

  • Update on Meltdown/Spectre

Tuesday 30th January 2018

The security team would to address the on-going Meltdown/Spectre saga.

Tuesday 23rd January 2018

On-going Meltdown/Spectre - dominated work so far this year.

EGI CSIRT F2F next week at CERN.

Plan to improve/update some of the GridPP security wiki pages in coming weeks.


Tuesday 12th December

  • Nothing new to report.

Tuesday 5th December

Nothing to report concerning the UK.

DI4R conference was last week, https://indico.egi.eu/indico/event/3455/

Plans for integration/co-operation between various projects security teams during EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) project presented

https://indico.egi.eu/indico/event/3455/session/12/contribution/77


  • GGUS tickets and the trust anchor. Who to ticket result?

Tuesday 28th November

  • Nothing new to report (tracking update from last week - remember you can check your site!)

Tuesday 21st November

A few sites have showed up in pakiti with high risk vulnerabilities. If you haven't been prodded about this already then expect an email from someone in the security team soon.

Monday 30th October

  • EGI SVG ALERT [TLP:WHITE] Up to 'CRITICAL' risk, kernel exploit CVE-2017-7184 and others [EGI-SVG-CVE-2017-7184]
  • Upcoming meetings
    • Details and registration for SOC WG Workshop in December: Advert Indico



Services - PerfSonar production dashboard |PerfSonar development dashboard | GridPP VOMS

- This includes notifying of (inter)national services that will have an outage in the coming weeks or will be impacted by work elsewhere. (Cross-check the Tier-1 update).

Monday 5th February

  • 'Campus network engineering for data-intensive science workshop' in October 2016, had this agenda. Note particularly the Imperial and Cambridge overviews.
  • There is a JISC document which seeks to help set expectations for what the network can deliver.


Monday 22nd January

Monday 20th November

  • perfSONAR: No news.
  • GridPP DIRAC: DPM & xrootd version. Upgrade due 16th November.
  • RIPE ATLAS probes: Status & tests TBC
  • The next LHCOPN/LHCONE meeting will be at RAL 6-7th March 2018. The UK position on LHCONE is being reviewed. RAL T1 will (likely) connect via the LHCOPN in the coming months. T2s watch this space!


Monday 23rd October

  • The LHCOPN/ONE meeting took place last week at KEK, co-hosted with the HEPiX Fall meeting.
    • You can find a short report of the meeting here.
    • All the slides presented are available in the agenda.

Tuesday 4th July

  • Pete C is preparing another networking forward look document. Note that figures presented in the Manchester workshop were for a Tier-2 (not always a single site).

here

  • Duncan has recreated the UK perfSONAR mesh. Link here!


Tickets

Monday 5th February 2018, 15.30 GMT
38 Open UK Tickets this month

IPv6 Tickets
Sussex: 131617 On Hold (15/11/17)
RALPP: 131616 Chris put in a nice update a fortnight ago, citing some perfsonar problems. In progress (31/1)
Oxford: 131615 No recent news on the ticket but I think there's v6 progress at Oxford? On hold (7/11/17)
Cambridge: 131614 On hold (15/11/17)
Bristol: 131613 Early February was the estimated time to get the perfsonar boxes dual stacked, how's that looking? On hold (7/11)
Birmingham: 131612 Duncan poked the ticket last month. On hold (11/11/17)
Glasgow: 131611 I think any further news awaits you chaps moving into your new digs (once they're built). On hold (6/11)
ECDF: 131610 Planning is underway, Raul has kindly offered to help. In progress (5/2)
Durham: 131609 The v6 reverse DNS at Durham is still not working, Adam has provided an update on this. In progress (31/1)
Sheffield: 131608 Is there anyway we can help encourage the University to enable v6 for you? On hold (6/11/17)
Manchester: 131607 Duncan reckons you now have v6 reverse DNS lookup, so that's good news. On hold (1/2)
Liverpool: 131606 As further progress here is reliant on some upstream routers getting upgraded maybe this ticket should be put on hold? In progress (14/11/17)
Lancaster: 131605 Lancaster is just waiting on some testing from a v6 only endpoint. I'm working on setting up a v6 only UI to see if that helps. In progress (5/2)
UCL: 131604 Waiting on central IT to get back. On hold (15/1)
RHUL: 131603 RHUL's perfsonar boxen are now dualstacked - nice. On hold (31/1)

Regular Tickets:

SUSSEX
122772 (11/7/16)
Atlas xroot/webdav ticket. At last word just before Christmas Leo was waiting on some ports being opened up in the external firewall. Any joy? In progress (19/12/17)

RALPP
133250 (5/2/1042)
A ROD ticket - the date looks a bit suspect (I don't think GGUS has been around for that long). The test (ch.cern.WebDAV) and the server failing it (mover.pp.rl.ac.uk) all sound a bit weird too. Assigned (2/2/2018)

133274 (5/2)
CMS xroot failures. Things were fixed by a trusty restart script, but Chris has asked about the state of the AAA network. Waiting for reply (5/2)

OXFORD
133215 (31/1)
Atlas deletion errors on the newly reinstalled Oxford SE. After consulting on the dpm list Kashif tweaked his mysql settings and is in the "wait and see" phase. In progress (5/2)

BRISTOL
133220 (1/2)
CMS hammercloud jobs hitting their wall clock limit - for reason for which is proving a bit of a mystery. Luke has looked into this very closely so far, but it might be some weird emergent property. In progress (2/2)

BIRMINGHAM
132569 (19/12/17)
Dirac pilots not being able to be submitted to Birmingham. I think the problem is well understood, have the effected VOs been removed from the bdii? Assigned (22/1)

129930 (4/8/17)
Atlas http tests failing at Birmingham. Perhaps Kashif might have some insight into this after his recent DPM adventure? Although maybe this ticket will become moot. On hold (16/11/17)

GLASGOW
133115 (29/1)
Checking if the new lchb conddb cvmfs mount is mounted. For some odd reason some of Glasgow CEs are failing/not running the tests. Despite all the tests running across the same WNs. In progress (5/2) Update- LHCB seem to think this is a problem with the tests, and so the ticket can be closed.

ECDF
133222 (5/2/3164)
A ROD ticket from the distant future! The tests look okay now, so I suspect this ticket can be closed. Waiting for reply (5/2/2018)

SHEFFIELD
133019 (24/1)
Low availability ticket, all good. On hold (30/1)

133260 (3/2)
Atlas transfers failing. Any luck debugging this? In progress (3/2)

MANCHESTER
131526 (1/11/17)
Storage accounting deployment. Were there some roadblocks for this? On hold (12/1)

LIVERPOOL
133114 (29/1)
New LHCB mountpoint ticket. It looks like this ticket was missed. Assigned (29/1)

RHUL
132715 (4/1)
Supporting hyperk.org. Any word on this? In progress (22/1)

QMUL
132713 (4/1)
Support for hyperk.org. Sadly despite some fixing errors persist. In progress (5/2)

132929 (18/1)
CMS APEL problem for QM jobs. Due to a problem with SLURM, Dan originally "unsolved" this ticket. Reopened with some useful tips, but the apel team has been involved to check on this, which was the right call. In progress (29/1)

BRUNEL
132876 (16/1)
CMS seeing reading issues at Brunel. After some expert debugging from Raul I think we're waiting on the CERN ticket 133010. In progress (5/2)

IMPERIAL (kinda)
132688 (3/1)
A lost pheno files ticket that bounced back to IC. Just waiting for word back from users (which may take a while). In progress (25/1)

TIER 1
132589 (21/12/17)
Killed LHCB pilots at the Tier 1. There's a proposal to mark the ticket "unsolved", but Vladimir seems reluctant to do this. In progress (31/1)

117683 (18/11/15)
The old Glue 2 publishing for Castor ticket. Last news is that a prototype version is in testing. On hold (3/1)

127597 (4/7/17)
CMS ticket checking xroot and network performance. Chris provided a good news update - new firewall hardware is on its way. However this might not fix things, Chris warns more work might be needed. On hold (29/1)

124876 (7/11/16)
Echo failing gridftp nagios tests - due to the tests being broken. Absolutely no movement on the linked ticket to fix the tests (125026). On hold (13/11/17)

132708 (4/1)
The ticket tracking the decommissioning for the RAL WMSseses. It's going well. In progress (18/1)

Tools - MyEGI Nagios

Monday 20th November

Tuesday 18th July

  • Following our ops discussion last week, Steve will focus his tests on supporting the GridPP DIRAC area and decommission the other tests.


VOs - GridPP VOMS VO IDs Approved VO table

Monday 20th November

  • Tom Whyntie has requested (and been granted) access to the GridPP VO to get some pipelines working for large-scale processing and analysis of MRI scans associated with the UK Biobank project.
  • All VOs in the incubation page being prompted for updates by the end of November (required input for OC documents).
  • QMUL (Steve L) is following up on the biomed MoU. GridPP want to be cited in research papers for the support our resources/sites provide.


Site Updates

Date



Meeting Summaries
Project Management Board - MembersMinutes Quarterly Reports

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GridPP ops meeting - Agendas Actions Core Tasks

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RAL Tier-1 Experiment Liaison Meeting (Wednesday 13:30) Agenda Meeting takes place on Vidyo.

Highlights from this meeting are now included in the Tier1 report farther up this page.

WLCG Grid Deployment Board - Agendas MB agendas

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NGI UK - Homepage CA

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Events
UK ATLAS - Shifter view News & Links

Atlas S&C week 2-6 Feb 2015

Production

• Prodsys-2 in production since Dec 1st

• Deployment has not been transparent , many issued has been solved, the grid is filled again

• MC15 is expected to start soon, waiting for physics validations, evgen testing is underway and close to finalised.. Simulation expected to be broadly similar to MC14, no blockers expected.

Rucio

• Rucio in production since Dec 1st and is ready for LHC RUN-2. Some fields need improvements, including transfer and deletion agents, documentation and monitoring.

Rucio dumps available.

Dark data cleaning

files declaration . Only Only DDM ops can issue lost files declaration for now, cloud support needs to fill a ticket.

• Webdav panda functional tests with Hammercloud are ongoing

Monitoring

Main page

DDM Accounting

space

Deletion

ASAP

• ASAP (ATLAS Site Availability Performance) in place. Every 3 months the T2s sites performing BELOW 80% are reported to the International Computing Board.


UK CMS

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UK LHCb

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UK OTHER
  • N/A
To note

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