From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Jan 28 13:28:21 2005 Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:05:59 +0000 (GMT) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Mike Read , Nigel Hambly , Nicholas Cross , Bob Mann Cc: CCs for WSA weekly meeting minutes distribution -- Andrew Lawrence , Andy Adamson , Peter Shillan , John Taylor , Jim Emerson , Malcolm Stewart , Martin Hill , Mike Irwin , Peredur Williams , Stephen Warren Subject: WFAU WSA weekly meeting minutes, 28 January 2005 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 28th January 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, PMW, ETWS, NJC Apologies: MCH, GPS, JPE, MAR, JDT, JMS, AL, RGM, DONM: 10am, Friday 4th February 2005, plate library Actions discharged: ------------------- ACTION: NCH to remind MAR to send JPE the VISTA ETC code that is deployed on the VSC pages. Discharged. ACTION: ETWS to get Horst's advice on this and to suggest a system disk mirroring policy on djoser to guard against future downtime. Discharged: HME has advised a cron job to dump critical system partitions to RAID5 array on a 4-day/weekly (partial/full) timescale. ACTION: NCH to instigate system disk backup policy on the W2K3 servers. Discharged: NCH has backed up the current public server single disk system partition to RAID5 disk. System partitions are currently being relocated to fault-tolerant RAID5 arrays. Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: MAR to check out SQL Server networked server functionality for cross-server querying. Continues; NCH suggested we should do some experiments with the linked SQL Servers ahmose & amenhotep once the dust has settled on their reorganisation over the next couple of weeks. ACTION: ETWS to put (or link) ACD's network document on the WSA TWiki. Continues: (still) awaiting the finished article from ACD. - continuing; thanks for progressing these. Actions carried forward from 21/01/04 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- None this week. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: NCH & PMW noted the VDMT telecon next Thurs at 2pm. PMW will do the rounds early next week to get a progress update. WFCAM update: No news this week Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: No new minutes as of 28/01/05. Networking: There has been much email exchanged between JAC, CASU & WFAU concerning raw FITS headers, and despite some misunderstandings (mainly on the part of NCH) things seem to be looking OK at this point. NCH received much useful input from RGMcM (CASU) concerning WSA user interface issues and the schema browser; these have been forwarded to MAR for his perusal during development of the WSA web pages. More exchanges on user registration have resulted in a tentative agreement to go down the Astrogrid "community" route: see below. NCH suggested to NJC that he might like to join the UKIDSS consortium, as an interested scientist and potential observer. ACTION: NJC to email Steve Warren to ask to join the UKIDSS consortium. Hardware: Much useful correspondence with JAC this week concerning RAID arrays and disk failures. NCH has calculated that we appear to be chewing up disks at about 5 to 10x the manufacturers specified rate (maybe manufacturers tend to be optimistic). This could be because of temperature problems in C1. This issue has just been resolved by increasing the aircon capacity in the room by a factor 2x; ambient temperature is now down (!) from around 25 C to 17 C. PMW suggested we should monitor temperatures inside the rackmount cabs; NCH also noted that PH (JAC) has suggested use of SMART monitoring data. If disks continue to fail at above the manufacturers MTBF, operating temperature will be the first thing to be investigated. NCH noted that the archive load server ahmose is still offline, awaiting reconfiguration of system partitions. After replacing some cables and a disk backplane, the disk IO subsystem is being checked out. So far, so good... Software: Much progress this week on CUs 1-4, 7 & 9 by ETWS, NJC and NCH; also progress on user interface issues (MAR) via an initial look at deploying Astrogrid software with JDT. ETWS has done some major refactoring of CU2, particularly with regard to reading FITS headers (PyFITS is now being employed). NJC has worked on robustifying the ingest codes by implementing range checking; NCH continues to protoype the list-driven photometry driving procedure based on the CASU prototype tool. SSA: No news this week. Astrogrid deployment: JDT and MAR have been looking at deployment of AG community and registry services with a view to implementing the emerging UKIDSS/WFCAM data access policies. Miscellaneous: Nothing else this week.