From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Feb 6 15:23:46 2009 Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 12:20:47 +0000 (GMT) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Mike Read , Mark Holliman , Nigel Hambly , Nicholas Cross , Rob Blake , Ross Collins Cc: CCs for WSA weekly meeting minutes distribution -- Andrew Lawrence , Andy Adamson , Jim Emerson , Malcolm Stewart , Lorenzo Rimoldini , Mike Irwin , Peredur Williams , Bob Mann , Stephen Warren Subject: WFAU VDFS Science Archive weekly project meeting minutes, 6/2/09 Minutes of WFAU VDFS Science Archive meeting: 6th February 2009 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, ETWS, NJC, RSC, PMW, MSH Apologies: JPE, JMS, AL, RGM, MAR, LGR, RPB DoNM: 10am, Friday February 13th 2009 in the Vista Hut Actions discharged this week: ----------------------------- None this week Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: ETWS to parse that latest keyword info into the VSA metadata schema files. Continues ACTION: NCH to assign U/08B/14 H2/K frames to the GPS in the WSA. Continues Actions carried forward from 30/01/09 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- None this week Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: Nothing of note this week. WFCAM & VISTA updates: Nothing new to report this week. Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: The team noted the (draft) minutes of the meeting of 9th Feb. There were some comments: regarding the CVS version number/software provenance issue, our advice is to switch to SVN which provides a single repository revision number regardless of which source file has changed; also we noted that for DR6 preparations (i.e. not yet!) we will need an updated version of the CASU source extractor software. ETWS and RSC wondered what version of cfitsio this will be wedded to, and if it will run on 64-bit linux. Networking: CASU let us know earlier in the week that they have finished the 08B recatalogue processing and transfer of 08A would have started except that ... WSA Operations: ... unfortunately the loss of a RAID array on the load server ahmose has resulted in WSA ingest DB unavailability all week while we restored from backup - RPB noted "the final restore of the WSA finished last night. However, although all the data has finished copying, BackupExec claims the job is still ongoing. From having a look on ahmose, it looks like it's running a Consistency Check as a final job. This has been going since at least 9:30 last night, but god knows when it's going to finish." Hardware: Just two casualties from last weekend's server moves - RPB noted: "Ahmose status: The failed logical volume on Ahmose turned out to be caused by a simple dodgy cable. Sadly, we only found this out after we'd deleted the original volume. Restores of the WSA have been continuing apace all week and should be finished by Friday morning. Djoser status: A failed disk on djoser seems to be causing problems everytime the system tries to fsck one of the volumes. Nathalie has put in an order for a replacement disk. Once this arrives, it will be installed and the degraded array can be fixed. Until then, djoser seems happy enough to mount the dodgy filesystem even without checking it. MSH noted that the new NAS box (pami) is up and running, so plenty of storage space is now available to ops. MSH also suggested (with regard to last week's minutes) that old VO-TECH server thor be reconstituted as a VDFS processing server as it has a similar spec to khafre. [Note added after meeting: server name should be "menkaure" as it's a procesing node, not a catalogue server]. The suggestion is to expand it's physical memory to 8GB and install 64-bit linux for large VISTA tile handling capability. Software: RSC reported: "Finally made some significant progress in testing our software on khafre's new 64-bit system install. Several issues had to be fixed: * The latest GCC compiler applies the C/C++ standard more strictly, so the C/C++ code has been updated to satisfy its warning messages. * Python 2.6 fixes several 64-bit related problems, but deprecated some methods used by our Python scripts, so these have all been updated but only where absolutely necessary at this stage. Mostly this consists of external process calls now needing to be made through the subprocess module. * The new fpack 1.1 version requires new command-line options, so our code now uses a different interface for different servers depending on the version of fpack installed. * Our 64-bit installation of CASU's source extractor, cirdr, is failing with run-time errors because it's using an old version of CFITSIO that is not 64-bit compatible. We believe we can fix this by linking it the latest version of CFITSIO. * There appears to be no consequences so far in our upgrade to the latest version of mxODBC, but more testing required. The fixes have been committed to trunk and will be released in a new release_10 branch when complete, allowing us to revert to the release_9 branch version if we come across any unintended side-effects. The current set of fixes have been tested and seen to work on both the 64-bit and 32-bit systems. The standard user .login file in the src/installation directory in SVN has been updated to work with both 64-bit and 32-bit systems, so users should update their .logins to this specification. Also, the PYTHONVER environment variable needs to be set to 'python2.6' to run the Python scripts on khafre." ETWS noted: -- Included the version number change for the reprocessed 08A/B data in our helper script to update database entries and tested it extensively. -- Made some more progress on the VSA schemas. Survey Data Release: Nothing new to report Non-survey Data Release: Nothing new to report. Astrogrid deployment & Data Analysis services: No news this week. Miscellaneous: Starlink software survey call at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=TWzBrMV1TIGAF6gWcpaEUg_3d_3d ACTION: RSC to fill in Starlink SW questionnaire on behalf of WFAU; ALL to fill in for personal use ============================================================= Nigel Hambly Tel: +44-131-668-8234 Institute for Astronomy Fax: +44-131-668-8416 School of Physics and Astronomy University of Edinburgh Email: nch@roe.ac.uk Royal Observatory Blackford Hill Edinburgh EH9 3HJ The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. =============================================================