35 research outputs found

    EU DataGRID testbed management and support at CERN

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    In this paper we report on the first two years of running the CERN testbed site for the EU DataGRID project. The site consists of about 120 dual-processor PCs distributed over several testbeds used for different purposes: software development, system integration, and application tests. Activities at the site included test productions of MonteCarlo data for LHC experiments, tutorials and demonstrations of GRID technologies, and support for individual users analysis. This paper focuses on node installation and configuration techniques, service management, user support in a gridified environment, and includes considerations on scalability and security issues and comparisons with "traditional" production systems, as seen from the administrator point of view.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 7 pages, LaTeX. PSN THCT00

    Configuration Tools: Working Together

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    Since the LISA conferences began, the character of a typical ‘‘large installation’ ’ has changed greatly. Most large sites tended to consist of a comparatively small number of handcrafted ‘‘servers’ ’ supporting a larger number of very similar ‘‘clients’ ’ (which would usually be configured with the aid of some automatic tool). A modern large site involves a more complex mesh of services, often with demanding requirements for completely automatic reconfiguration of entire services to provide fault-tolerance. As these changes have happened however, the tools available to provide configuration management for a site have not evolved to keep pace with these new challenges. This paper looks at some of the reasons why configuration tools have failed to move forward, and presents some suggestions for enabling the state of the art to advance. Background and Motivation Configuration Tools have been an important theme at LISA for many years, and most conferences include one or more papers in this area. Despite increasing recognition of the importance of the configuratio

    Installing, Running and Maintaining Large Linux Clusters at CERN

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    Having built up Linux clusters to more than 1000 nodes over the past five years, we already have practical experience confronting some of the LHC scale computing challenges: scalability, automation, hardware diversity, security, and rolling OS upgrades. This paper describes the tools and processes we have implemented, working in close collaboration with the EDG project [1], especially with the WP4 subtask, to improve the manageability of our clusters, in particular in the areas of system installation, configuration, and monitoring. In addition to the purely technical issues, providing shared interactive and batch services which can adapt to meet the diverse and changing requirements of our users is a significant challenge. We describe the developments and tuning that we have introduced on our LSF based systems to maximise both responsiveness to users and overall system utilisation. Finally, this paper will describe the problems we are facing in enlarging our heterogeneous Linux clusters, the progress we have made in dealing with the current issues and the steps we are taking to gridify the clustersComment: 5 pages, Proceedings for the CHEP 2003 conference, La Jolla, California, March 24 - 28, 200

    Quattor: Tools and Techniques for the Configuration, Installation and Management of Large-Scale Grid Computing Fabrics

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    This paper describes the quattor tool suite, a new system for the installation, configuration, and management of operating systems and application software for computing fabrics. At present Unix derivatives such as Linux and Solaris are supported. Quattor is a powerful, portable and modular open source solution that has been shown to scale to thousands of computing nodes and offers a significant reduction in management costs for large computing fabrics. The quattor tool suite includes innovations compared to existing solutions which make it very useful for computing fabrics integrated into grid environments. Evaluations of the tool suite in current large scale computing environments are presented

    Rehearsal: A Configuration Verification Tool for Puppet

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    Large-scale data centers and cloud computing have turned system configuration into a challenging problem. Several widely-publicized outages have been blamed not on software bugs, but on configuration bugs. To cope, thousands of organizations use system configuration languages to manage their computing infrastructure. Of these, Puppet is the most widely used with thousands of paying customers and many more open-source users. The heart of Puppet is a domain-specific language that describes the state of a system. Puppet already performs some basic static checks, but they only prevent a narrow range of errors. Furthermore, testing is ineffective because many errors are only triggered under specific machine states that are difficult to predict and reproduce. With several examples, we show that a key problem with Puppet is that configurations can be non-deterministic. This paper presents Rehearsal, a verification tool for Puppet configurations. Rehearsal implements a sound, complete, and scalable determinacy analysis for Puppet. To develop it, we (1) present a formal semantics for Puppet, (2) use several analyses to shrink our models to a tractable size, and (3) frame determinism-checking as decidable formulas for an SMT solver. Rehearsal then leverages the determinacy analysis to check other important properties, such as idempotency. Finally, we apply Rehearsal to several real-world Puppet configurations.Comment: In proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) 201

    A potpourri of system configuration concepts

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    For many reasons, large and small installations of computers can benefit from Automated Configuration Management tools. All the processes from installation, configuration, to maintenance and updating the computers can benefit from automation for the following reasons. * Consistency across all the machines. * Timeliness in maintenance and updates * Simplify the process through the use declarative instructions. Meanwhile in software configuration management, they are examining the problems of identifying, controlling, monitoring and verifying changes in software development projects. To complicate matters, some of the reasons for software configuration management * Consistency in the source code. * Timeliness in updates to the project members so that they have what is needed. * A need to simplify documentation and development of complex projects. Subsequently, the purpose of this thesis is to understand how concepts from Software Configuration Management can aid the development of the field of System Configuration. To achieve this purpose, this thesis will start with an examination of the similiarities between SCM and System configuration. This will be followed by an examination of different key concepts in System Configuration and the following three different tools that have taken different approaches to the problem. * Cfengine * ISconf * LSconf With an understanding of how System Configuration and SCM are similar and an understanding of many of the major concepts in System Configuration, the next step is to examine some of the difference between the two fields. From there, it should be possible to see how some concepts from SCM could be applied to System Configuration. It should also be possible to examine concepts from System Configuration that could be applied to SCM

    The INFN-grid testbed

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    The Italian INFN-Grid Project is committed to set-up, run and manage an unprecedented nation-wide Grid infrastructure. The implementation and use of this INFN-Grid Testbed is presented and discussed. Particular care and attention are devoted to those activities, relevant for the management of the Testbed, carried out by the INFN within international Grid Projects

    Investigating Configuration Management Tools Usage in Large Infrastructure

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    The large variety of configuration management (CM) tools available makes it difficult for the customers to select the appropriate one for their needs. Thus this research investigated the users’ perception of CM tools in order to gain information useful for customers and CM tool developers. In total 72 system administrators were sampled and qualitative data was collected through structured questionnaires. Data was analyzed by Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to find the best CM tool according to selected criteria. The most desired deployment properties were installability, configurability, scalability and stability and the most appreciated specification management properties were language, access control, monitoring and testing properties. Another important factor was whether the CM tool vendors provided good customer support. However, on the basis of people’s perception CFEngine was the best tool to use in large infrastructure

    Dynamic configuration management

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    During recent years, the amount of software in container handling equipment has increased and automation has a greater role in container terminal operations. Automation systems must be able to constantly adapt to changing environments and container operator requirements. In addition, it should be possible to monitor the state of the system in order to confirm that it has adapted to the new configurations correctly. The focus of this thesis is on the configuration management of UniQ which is a data distribution framework developed by Cargotec Finland Oy. Within this thesis, a new piece of software, called UniConf, will be introduced for editing the configuration files of UniQ. UniConf allows users to edit configuration files with graphical user interface. UniConf can also validate the configuration files and create necessary installation packages so that configuration files can be installed into container handling equipment. To accomplish distribution of configuration files, existing configuration distribution systems are studied herein. This research has been done by studying manuals and other documentation offered by manufacturers of configuration distribution systems. The study focuses on the most crucial aspects concerning configuration distribution for container handling equipment
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