RAL Tier1 weekly operations castor 11/08/2014

Operations News

• Kashyap's Elasticsearch query script has been rolled out to CASTOR headnodes. Users are encouraged to test it and report any bugs.
• Samneet's query tool is under development and we hope to have an alpha version available for use by the end of next week.
• Plan to ensure PreProd represents production in terms of hardware generation are underway.
• The remaining 2014 disk servers have been deployed into production.

Operations Problems

• The problems with the draining tool have been understood and a fix is being change-controlled on Monday
• A new service class called 'cedaRetrieve' has been created to allow CEDA users (aka Kevin) to manually stage files for retrieval.
• The rebalancer has been tested and found to cause problematically large transfermanager queues even with low thresholds set. We will not be using it further until we have a fix.

Blocking Issues

• Neither rebalacing nor draining currently work.

Planned, Scheduled and Cancelled Interventions

• A Tier 1 Database cleanup is planned so as to eliminate a number of excess tables and other entities left over from previous CASTOR versions. This will be change-controlled in the near future.

Advanced Planning

Tasks

• Possible future upgrade to CASTOR 2.1.14-15.
• Resume draining on the ATLAS instance once draining issues resolved.
• Switch from admin machines: lcgccvm02 to lcgcadm05
• New VM configured to run against the standby CASTOR database will be created as a front-end for dark data etc queries.
• Replace DLF with Elastic Search
• Correct partitioning alignment issue (3rd CASTOR partition) on new castor disk servers

Interventions

• None

Staffing

• Castor on Call person
  • Rob

• Staff absence/out of the office:
  • Chris, Matt and Shaun out all week