Business as unusual

There's a been a lot of little things happening up here; individually none of them quite big enough to blog about.

And after a while, it's worth doing a catch up post about them. This is that post.

David started a couple of weeks ago, and Mark is starting on Monday; just in time for the GridPP meeting. It's seeming to be a tradition that every time we get new hardware, the staff rotate; Dug and myself started just around the last hardware upgrade.

The hardware this time is mostly a petabyte of storage to be added, so David's been working on ways of testing the disks before we sign off on them.

GridPP; next week. Usual round of site reports, and future planning. With the data from the LHC now a routine matter, it's time to start thinking about future needs. I'll be talking about non-(particle)-physcists on the Grid, as a nod towards the longer term EGI picture.

We noticed some load balancing issues on our SL5 disk pool nodes; Sam's been poking at that, and it looks like there's a mix of issues, from filesystem type (ext4 is better than xfs here), and clustering of files onto nodes.

And that's most of the interesting stuff from up here. Hopefully we'll have more to post about over the next few months