From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Oct 29 12:50:20 2004 Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 11:21:46 +0100 (BST) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Harvey MacGillivray , Ian Bond , Mike Read , Nigel Hambly , Bob Mann Cc: CCs for WSA weekly meeting minutes distribution -- Clive Davenhall , Andrew Lawrence , Andy Adamson , Peter Shillan , John Taylor , Jim Emerson , Malcolm Stewart , Martin Hill , Mike Irwin , Peredur Williams Subject: WFAU WSA weekly meeting minutes, 29th October 2004 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 29th October 2004 ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, PMW, JDT, JMS, AL Apologies: JPE, RGM, ETWS, MCH, GPS, MAR, HMG DONM: 10am, Friday 12th November, plate library Actions discharged: ------------------- ACTION: HMG to oversee the removal of the DVD towers from C1. Discharged. ACTION: NCH to chase up Eclipse to enquire as to status of the upgrade orders. Discharged; see Hardware below. Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: MAR to check out SQL Server networked server functionality for cross-server querying. Continues; see Hardware below. ACTION: PMW to clarify what remains of development hardware money with JPE. Continues; JPE has been contacted. ACTION: NCH to remember to action a team programmer to implement range checking in the low-level ingest codes. ETWS & NCH have been discussing this; likely that the new developer will be assigned this task to start them off. ACTION: JDT to liaise with MCH concerning an end-to-end test of the PAL deployment. Some final registry issues to reslove before external testing is possible Continuing... ACTION: PMW to apply a little pressure to the premises team to solve the continuing problem of heat overload in C1. Continues... ACTION: ALL to review risk register and think of any new internal or external risks that should be documented in the risk register. Defered until top level plan is explicitly defined. PMW tabled the VISTA risk register as an example. ACTION: JPE to design and set up centralised VDFS web pages. Progressing. (there is now a link to it from our WSA Twiki). - continuing; thanks for progressing these. Actions carried forward from 22/10/04 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- None this week. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: JMS noted that there is a VDMT on Friday next week; JMS and PMW will attend by telecon; PMW will do the usual report to present to the team. NCH is involved with the launch of the Digital Curation Centre at NeSC all day on Friday, so will not be able to attend (boo hoo). This also means that there will be no weekly meeting next week. NCH has drafted the case for WSA operations (incl. storage hardware upgrades) and has circulated the draft to AL, RGM and PMW. PMW has received a digitally signed copy of the UK VISTA URD; NCH enquired as to the status of this document: is it officially released, and if so can it be put on the VDFS web site so that we can point to it in our current RG renewal cases (presumably several other people need to digitally sign the thing first)? Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: The meeting noted the minutes of the CASU meeting of 20/10/2004; there were no comments. Networking: Nothing new this week. Hardware: NCH has been in touch with Eclipse over the upgrades. Originally scheduled for Friday 29th; the first of the catalogue server upgrades will now take place on Monday 1st Nov (rackmount components problematic, as usual). NCH reported looking into MS SQL Server "linked server" functionality, which is a poor-man's cluster solution with SQL Server. This looks rather powerful, and will, in the medium term, provide a solution to the problem of adding CPU grunt to the WSA if this becomes necessary. Basically, several SQL Servers can be deployed on a network and linked; any one can be queried with query object specifiers pointing to any database object stored on any server on the linked network. This will allow us to distribute databases over several independent CPUs if necessary. Software: NCH noted that there has been no progress on software this week owing to ETWS being on leave, MAR at ADASS and NCH occupied with the RG renewal case. SSA: NCH noted that after around 4 months of trouble free operation, the online SSA database server ahmose threw its toys out of the pram last Friday afternoon. It was down for 3 days in total (including the weekend when systems maintenance was unavailable). It is now back up and working normally. The problem was the same old disk instability issue which is being solved with the imminent upgrade. Interestingly, over the past 184 days since deployment, a total of 21 days have been lost (mainly due to the known problem) which equates to an archive availability of 89% - quite poor, but this will dramatically improve once the disk subsystem upgrades are done. Astrogrid deployment: Again, still some issues concerning web (SOAP) services, testing hampered by the database server problem this week and relevant staff all being at ADASS. Investigations are continuing. Miscellaneous: Nothing else this week.