Top Level BDII for ScotGrid

I setup a top level BDII for ScotGrid this morning. I have put it onto svr019 (the MON box) as these machines are very capable to running multiple services on this type (and svr019 might as well do something useful ;-).

I'll add a top level alias as bdii.scotgrid.ac.uk, and as load increases more machines can be added here.

Before I actively use it for ScotGrid, though, I will let it run for a week or so - I'm naturally nervous about MCE errors these days and although svr019 has not suffered any thus far, our experience suggests that loading up a machine can cause things to be more fragile in this respect.

Although the BDII is a simple node to install with YAIM, I'm really pleased how much value we get from running cfengine these days - just telling it the machine is in the grid class now does so much. So I only had to add two lines to cfengine to handle the whole install: one in packages, to get glite-BDII installed, one in shell commands to invoke the YAIM configure_node. So easy!

Andrew has been pushing on with file transfer tests using the new site. The good news is that initial indicators are that we seem to be able to get much better rates: up to 650Mb/s incoming from Edinburgh.

However, he managed to provoke an MCE error twice on disk041 - so this server definately has bad memory.

Fortunately dpm-drain decided to start working (last time I tried to get data off this machine it failed with various bizarre errors) so it was very simple to move the 14GB of files off and remove this partition from the DPM. (Most of the data was dteam test dat, so fingers crossed there's been no corruption of the small number of pheno files.)

ClusterVision have been informed and David is working on a reliable way of triggering these errors so that we can test machines before they go back into production.