RAL Tier1 RSS Feeds
Contents
Introduction
Currently this page is mainly of interest to Tier1 staff.
The RAL Tier1 plans to publish as much information as possible about the current state of service including news items via RSS feeds. There are four current methods of publishing information all of which will be replaced by or in some cases fed by new RSS feeds.
- CSF Changes
- CSF User Mailing List
- News on login or message of the day.
- Sure web interface for service alerts.
Available Feeds for Users
For each feed available the recommended audience for the feed is defined.
There are currently no RSS feeds being published.
Proposal
Feeds will be created at least one per major experiment to be populated by T1 staff.
- ral-tier1a-vo-babar
- ral-tier1a-vo-cms
- ral-tier1a-vo-alice
- ral-tier1a-vo-lhcb
- ral-tier1a-vo-dzero
- .....
A feed that everyone should read to be populated by T1 staff.
- ral-tier1a-news
Feeds to support internal changes populated by T1 staff.
- ral-tier1a-changes
Feeds to support legacy mailing lists populated by T1 staff. These feeds will not generally be published as public, they only exist so that T1 staff have a single interface to send out to the mailing list as well as posting to feeds with a single news item.
- ral-tier1a-mail-csf-l
Feeds to support particular services populated by T1 staff and services admins where appropriate.
- ral-tier1a-service-oracle-fts
- ral-tier1a-service-oracle
Feeds generated out of alerts for services and user communities to be generated by nagios.
- ral-tier1a-nagios-all
- ral-tier1a-nagios-vo-babar
- ral-tier1a-nagios-vo-cms
- ral-tier1a-nagios-service-fts
Posting to the Feeds
The feeds maintained by T1 staff will be hosted on the E-Science RSS service page https://rss.esc.rl.ac.uk/. X509 certificate authentication is used for accessing the web interface.
When a news item is posted tick boxes can be checked to add the item to as many or as few feeds as is relevant. In general posting to as few feeds as possible makes sense as it reduces the unavoidable annoyance that some users of RSS feeds will see duplicate messages in two feeds.
Feeds are published from http://rss.esc.rl.ac.uk and currently this is blocked at the firewall which must change.
News on Login
The aim here is to encourage users of the interactive tier1 service to read news. A wrapper has been written around snownews to display information from RSS feeds on login. The snownews program can then be used to read and manage this news.
For each user a default set of feeds will be configured but they are welcome to remove or add extra feeds to these login messages. However for say a babar user they will have no choice but to be subscribed to ral-tier1a-vo-babar and ral-tier1a-news on login.
Nagios Feeds
It is easy to create RSS feeds from nagios as a notification is issued about something. These can be constructed based on relative user community, service or local administrator.
Mailing List Feeds
It is important for interactive users of the tier1 that a mailing list is maintained as has always been the case with the CSF-L users mailing list. The list will still exist but will now be populated by a designated RSS feed. This allows the administrators to use a consistent interface for all postings.
