2009-01-20

The firewall issues on ppewin have continued today (20th Jan) and I've been unable to fix the machine. Until a new windows printer server is setup printing via windows will not be possible. Printing from linux is unaffected.

I will be away at cern from tomorrow (Wednesday) until a week on Friday once I get back I'll start setting up a new printer server.

Andrew

2009-01-12

The upgraded ppe batch system is now up and running. The system can accessed as before at ppepbs.physics.gla.ac.uk .

The batch system twiki page: https://ppes8.physics.gla.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/IT/BatchSystem has some basic instructions for using the system.

2008-11-11

Two 64 bit scientific linux 4 machines have been added to the ppe network for general use. They can be accessed at ppelx64sl4.physics.gla.ac.uk.

The two ppelx.physics.gla.ac.uk machines remain 32 bit machines.

2008-10-24

The motherboard and OS upgrade on the ppe disc server is complete. All the ppe servers are once again up and running so that should be everything back to normal.

2008-10-17

The delayed change over of the motherboard and OS upgrade of the home area disc server will now take place next Friday (24th Oct).

A reminder that this work is to try and stop the crashes on this machine which have occasionally made the home areas unavailable.

The server will be shutdown at 10am on Friday 24th Oct and will be down for the rest of the working day. During this time home areas and some data areas will not be available. This includes via nfs on the linux desktops or via samba on the windows desktops. The groups internal web pages and the twiki will also be unavailable (the T4 pages will still work).

News

2008-07-15

A twiki for the group has been setup at:

https://ppes8.physics.gla.ac.uk/twiki

It's world readable but in order to edit pages you have to register and then send a request to ppesysman@physics.gla.ac.uk to put you on the allowed editors list.

The twiki is divided into several sections - webs in twiki parlance. At the moment there are ATLAS and DetDev webs as well as the usual twiki Main, TWiki and Sandbox webs and the ppeit wiki will be moving over to the twiki at some point. Just let me know what other webs are needed.

Once the twiki is working smoothly the url will change so it is accessible via a ppewww.physics.gla.ac.uk address but that will not be for a few weeks.

Local copies of the twiki documentation including the getting started tutorial can be found on the twiki in the TWiki web.

-- AndrewPickford

2008-07-04

The machine serving the home areas (ppes1) suffered a kernel oops again is this afternoon and rebooted. It's now back up and running.

Apologies for this I had thought the problem had been understood and worked around a month ago when the machine last had a kernel oops.

In order to try and fix this problem fully the plan is to change the motherboard on the machine for one identical to the motherboard in the second disc server. This will need half a days down time (during a weekday) to do and will require first backing up all the data on ppes1, which will take a few days to a week to do.

-- AndrewPickford

2008-06-30

The linux desktops will be updated from scientific linux 4.4 to scientific linux 4.6 over a next two weeks. This is an update between minor release versions and only needs the installed packages updated and then the machine to be rebooted. This can all be done remotely and only takes a few minutes. So as and when no one is logged onto a specific machine it will be updated and rebooted.

This should not affect any code as minor release versions are binary compatible but if the update does cause problems please let me know. The version of scientific linux runing on a particular machine can be checked by looking at the file /etc/redhat-release for an sl4.6 machine it contains:

Scientific Linux SL release 4.6 (Beryllium)

-- AndrewPickford