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Site Report Royal Holloway Sukhbir Johal Simon George Barry Green. Hardware. ~30 Desktop PC’s ranging from 300 MHz K6 to XP2400+ Athlon mostly RH7.3, few WinXP ~12 Desktop PC’s 450 K6 – 1700 Athlon for ATLAS test bed RH7.3 ~24 Laptops both personal and department-owned
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Site Report Royal Holloway Sukhbir JohalSimon GeorgeBarry Green RHUL
Hardware ~30 Desktop PC’s ranging from 300 MHz K6 to XP2400+ Athlon mostly RH7.3, few WinXP ~12 Desktop PC’s 450 K6 – 1700 Athlon for ATLAS test bed RH7.3 ~24 Laptops both personal and department-owned RH7.3, 9, Fedora and WinXP ~6 PC servers RH7.3 (one RH 6.0) – mostly Athlon XP2000-3000 NFS, NIS, Firewall, Web Server, etc. 1 PC server RH7.3 with 64bit kernel on a Athlon64! as yet unsuccessful with Fedora 64bit ~2 PC servers Windows2000 Native Active Directory Terminal server (Citrix/ICA), Office, VB RHUL
Hardware continued.. 3 Raid servers 2.0TB array running RH8 (2 will become SE’s for new Farm) user scratch volume, home backup 1 Sun E450 Solaris8 Home (NFS) 1 Sun E250 Solaris8 Babar 1 SunBlade100 Solaris8 Mentor (CAD) RHUL
Compusys Farm 75 nodes 2x Intel Xeon Processors 3Ghz 80GB HDD, 1GB RAM RH7.3 1 Master node 2x Intel Xeon Processors 3Ghz 2x 80GB HDD, 2GB RAM RH7.3 Failover master node, 1 AIT2 tape unit HP gigabit ethernet throughout Console switches Good experience with Compusys RHUL Grid: 1 LCFG install server 1 CE pbs interfaces with pbs on master node of farm 2 SE 2.0TB each (to be installed next week) RHUL
Network • Mostly Switched 100BaseT to desktops, 1000BaseT to servers • Connected to college 2Gb ring via 1Gb switch on VLAN • We are not firewalled by the college. • Our firewall is a default DENY setup • Laptops on 11Mb wireless network and 100Mb ethernet • Currently experimenting with a gateway/router for a private wireless subnetfor laptops • Network security • College suffers badly from worm epidemics • Mainly due to badly managed staff machines at home: • connecting via VPN from home or infected laptops brought in to work • We haven’t had an incident (yet) on the HEP network, but if the campus network is overrun we still suffer the consequences RHUL
Issues: • Hardware Specification Laptop/desktop - Linux compatibility • Laptop updates - use of Microsoft SUS for Win OS’s and Yum for RH • Laptop backup strategy • Security - physical and network • Linux releases RHUL
Projects: • Replacing aging desktop PCs • Replace 15 machines at once to get economies of scale • Buy pre-built to our spec • We decided on the following spec: • K7VTA3 (full ATX motherboard) 1.44 MB Floppy • AMD AthlonXP 2400+ CPU • 256MB DDRR PC2700 RAM • 40GB HDD 7200rpm • 16x DVD ROM • Radeon 7000 AGP 32MB graphics card • Competitive quotes from companies like: • Midland, BBN, Savastore, Nsysonline, Aligatortech, Pentathlon • Cost <£200 each • 5x PCI slots, 1x AGP slot • Supports AMD Athlon XP CPUs up to 3000+ • 333MHz FSB • on board 10/100Mbps LAN • on board audio • 6 USB 2.0 Ports (4 at rear, 2 at front) • 2 DIMM Slots (max. 2GB) DDR PC2700 • 1x Serial Port, 1x Parallel Port RHUL
Projects: • Remote windows update management: • Critical security issue for group laptops • Tried MS SUS1 (too buggy) and MBSA (useless and discontinued) • Waiting for Microsoft SUS release 2 which seems to have a lot more • features and is more stable for laptop updates. • Looking at Microsoft Services for Unix (SFU3.5) • Provides interoperability of Active Directory and NIS • NFS • Alternative to Samba? RHUL
Linux versions • RedHat 7.3 • updates from Fedora and CERN seem to work well • looks ok for the rest of this year • RHEL3 • cost still an issue, even though the lowest price has come down (workstation + educational price + no support) • admin effort of having to deal with paid licensing at all • concern that future CERN deal might not have the right pricing for us • Scientific Linux (SLC) • one test workstation set up, so far so good • seems like a perfect HEP solution • planning to use this on new desktop machines this summer (hardware support for new machines in RedHat 7.3 is now a problem) RHUL