Quattor Monthly Meeting - 3/6/10

Table of Contents

1. Progress since last meeting
2. AOB
3. Priorities/actions for next month
4. Conclusions

​Agenda

Progress since last meeting

COST project (Michel)

• Unfortunately the COST proposal was not accepted.
• Michel sent around the feedback to the quattor-discuss mailing list.
• It seems unlikely to have a funded project around Quattor, so the community should look to see what can be done with our own financing and effort.

SPMA (Victor)

• Continuing to work on the new templates, schema, and module.
• There are a few problems with the new version concerning the various function options.
• Had hoped to have a release before today, but will have one before the next meeting.
• Recent changes to the module from MS and changes in Perl-LC from Luis have been included in the new version.

Monitoring templates (David)

• Stuart attempted to check in changes to trunk, but someone on the list was using trunk directly and this caused problems.
• David and Stuart will instead create a branch to allow comparison with the NIKHEF version of the monitoring templates (for eventual convergence).
• Ronald said that there haven't been any recent changes to the monitoring templates they've checked in.
• Those templates are being used by GRIF to deploy a nagios server for the biomed VO.

panc 8.4 (Cal)

• This was released last week, but have limited feedback.
• LPNHE has been using the new version of panc without problems.
• However, something with the release broke CDB. Awaiting more information from CERN concerning this.
• Andrea said that he's tested it and sees no differences between 8.3.1 and 8.4 and will put it into production next week.
• Wesley said that MS has done some tests but isn't rushing it into production yet because the XML files are much larger than with 8.2.x (because the XML files are indented). Will confirm that disk space is sufficient for larger files.
• The compiler will gzip the generated files, but this needs to be tested with downstream components. Nick said that this should work with tools using standard libraries, but it is known that CDB2SQL will break if doing this.

MS developments into SVN (Nick)

• QuattorFS was released which is essentially a file system view of ncm-query information. Ian helped getting this out.
• MS did contribute back a patch to the SPMA code.
• Nick clarified that MS cannot release significant new functionality directly into SourceForge. Others will need to help for releasing initial versions of new tools.
• SixSq may be interested in collaborating in doing this and probably a direct phone call between MS and SixSq in a couple weeks would be helpful.
• Some changes to AII are still queued up and should arrive soon.
• QRC (Quattor Remote Configuration) can be released soon, but it is only a shell that isn't useful without plugins. The current plugin is for VMware which will need to be significantly cleaned up and checked (legally) to see if it can be released. Writing a plugin for OpenNebula might be interesting for StratusLab and could be something that SixSq would be interested in doing.

Maven progress (Cal)

• Cal and Eli Ronchieri (CNAF) are evaluating using maven as a build system for Quattor.
• Cal has looked into uploading generated packages into SourceForge as a maven repository. This works and could be a good option for creating a repository of Quattor packages.
• Eli has branched one of the Quattor configuration modules and is modifying the build to use maven. This is ongoing.
• The goal is to have panc, one Quattor configuration module and another major Quattor tool converted to maven to see if it is reasonable to move the complete Quattor build to maven.
• Should have more information at the next meeting.

Review of wiki content (Andrea)

• Not done yet. Will do in the coming week and send feedback to list.

AOB

Scott (MS) asked if anyone has experience with configuring network routers/equipment with Quattor. No one on the list did, but Scott will post an email to the list to see if there is someone with experience with this.

MS is seeing errors on the console with RHEL 5 from CAF::Lock. These appear to be harmless, but would like to know if anyone else is seeing them. Ian said that they are showing up at RAL. People seeing this should send information to the list so that the root cause can be tracked down.

Priorities/actions for next month

• Release of new SPMA (Victor)
• Branch of TCD monitoring templates in subversion (David/Stuart)
• Pan compiler: follow up issues with CDB (Cal/Veronique)
• MS/SixSq discussion around releases of new functionality and QRC plugin (Nick/Cal)
• Continuation of maven evaluation; concrete results for Quattor configuration component (Cal/Eli)
• Wiki content review for next week; feedback on list (Andrea)

Conclusions

Monthly meeting first Thursday of every month at 2 pm CET.

• Check ​Indico for agendas: all meeting created until Sept.
• Next meeting: July 1

EVO experience was fine today. Very few people were using the video aspects of EVO. David was using the Skype bridge from an iPhone which worked well. Next meeting should use EVO.