A Monitoring System for the BaBar INFN Computing Cluster

Monitoring large clusters is a challenging problem. It is necessary to observe a large quantity of devices with a reasonably short delay between consecutive observations. The set of monitored devices may include PCs, network switches, tape libraries and other equipments. The monitoring activity should not impact the performances of the system. In this paper we present PerfMC, a monitoring system for large clusters. PerfMC is driven by an XML configuration file, and uses the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) for data collection. SNMP is a standard protocol implemented by many networked equipments, so the tool can be used to monitor a wide range of devices. System administrators can display informations on the status of each device by connecting to a WEB server embedded in PerfMC. The WEB server can produce graphs showing the value of different monitored quantities as a function of time; it can also produce arbitrary XML pages by applying XSL Transformations to an internal XML representation of the cluster's status. XSL Transformations may be used to produce HTML pages which can be displayed by ordinary WEB browsers. PerfMC aims at being relatively easy to configure and operate, and highly efficient. It is currently being used to monitor the Italian Reprocessing farm for the BaBar experiment, which is made of about 200 dual-CPU Linux machines.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 10 pages, LaTeX, 4 eps figures. PSN MOET00

Results of the CEO Project - WWW Management

This report contains the result of a ‘proof of concept’ study that was performed by the CTIT of the University of Twente, together with ESYS Limited (Guildford, UK) for the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the EC (Ispra, Italy). The study is part of the ‘Centre of Earth Observation’ (CEO) programme. The subject of the study was the design and implementation of tools that allow status and utilisation monitoring of networks and distributed information servers. In the specific case of the CEO programme, these information servers are accessible via the WWW and contain large amounts of earth observation data (e.g. satellite pictures). The work division within the project was that ESYS investigated the management applications, which had to run on top of HP-Openview, and the CTIT designed and implemented the management agents. These agents had to include the following Management Information Bases (MIBs): • A HTTP-MIB, with detailed information concerning the WWW document transfer protocol. • A Retrieval Service (RS) MIB, with high level information concerning the WWW document transfer service. • An Information Store (IS) MIB, with information concerning the WWW server and the documents provided by that server. The specifications of these MIBs were presented to the IETF and provided a good starting point for subsequent standardization activities. The agents were implemented as sub-agents of the EMANATE extensible agent package and are currently being tested in a number of field trials

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Assessment Teams for First Responders in Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR) Missions

Immediately following a natural disaster requiring Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR), a myriad of organizations respond. Typically, these early responders send small assessment teams to determine critical needs, which are then paired with the resources available. The needs can range from basic subsistence (food, shelter, and water) to transportation and infrastructure, yet the paramount factor among each team is the need to communicate. To assist in this effort, an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) assessment team using standardized tactics, techniques, procedures and training to maximize effectivenessand comprised of members from multiple organizationscould provide a shared prospective among member groups that could ultimately produce a more objective and complete communications assessment. This in turn, could be transmitted immediately to the global response community via appropriate information sharing portals. As no such model exists at present, our research attempts to pioneer and explore this concept and capability by exploring and providing an outline of an ICT assessment team model. In this thesis, we examine its potential structure, methodologies, and equipment, as well as discuss prospective funding sources, and include in the appendices, checklists derived from our findings, thus improving and hastening early responders understanding of a disasters communications situation.http://archive.org/details/informationndcom109456768Lieutenant, United States Nav