Minutes of NAF User Committee meeting from 14.01.2009 ----------------------------------------------------- Present: Steve Aplin (ILC), Wolfgang Ehrenfeld (ATLAS), Andreas Gellrich (NAF), Kai Leffhalm (NAF), Niels Meyer (ILC), Hartmut Stadie (CMS), Jan Erik Sundermann (ATLAS), Alexey Zhelezov (LHC-B) Excused: Carsten Hof (CMS) 1. News from the chair General announcements: LHC-b handed in their NAF requirement paper, which will be discussed with the NAF admins and feedback will be given in the next NUC meeting. The dates for the meetings this year were briefly discussed. In March we will try to organise a room at the DPG in Munich. In May we will have the next face-to-face meeting. Either in Hamburg or in Zeuthen. From Grid board: The Grid Project workshop 2009 will be held at Munich from February 9th to 10th 2009. Andreas Haupt will give the NAF Status and Plan talk and Wolfgang Ehrenfeld the NAF User Committee report. Both speaker should send a draft in time to the NUC mailing list. From Analysis Center: The next Terascale newsletter will feature an article about the NAF. Hartmut will write the introduction, Andreas H. and Yves the hardware part, Wolfgang the experiment, support and NUC part. The newsletter will be published early February. 2. Action items: Admin documentation: It is not obvious where the afs_admin documentation is. Kai will placed it on a dedicated experiment admin web page from the NUC web page. Item closed Documentation for batch exit/failure codes: The user job monitoring pages now contain plain text instead of number for the exit code. Additional information about exit/failure codes should be added to the FAQ. Registry web service: It is not possible to get a more NAF related web address for the registry web service. The current and now official address is https://www-zeuthen.desy.de/dv-bin/nafreg/registration.cgi. Item closed. dcap/gsidcap access: Wolfgang talked to Patrick Fuhrmann, which said that gsidcap authentication is only done once when the first file is opened and the tunnel is set up. Transfer should not be affected. If another file is read it will be done to the same tunnel and no authentication is needed. Yves did some timing studies using dccp and dcap/gsidcap protocol. The difference is around one second. For a few more details see the status report. Batch capacity monitoring: The discussion is still ongoing. Wolfgang explained once more that the efficiency of the system is usually the first number to see how good the system is running/used. For the efficiency the number of total slots and running jobs is needed. The first was static in the monitoring plots and should be dynamically updated. It is unclear if this can be done by the NAF admins. Action items with no update: NAF: document software updates/changes Wolfgang Ehrenfeld: Proposal for software docu web page. 3. Status report Status report was given by Kai. See the agenda for the report. IT is planing for a major network upgrade in Hamburg on February 17th. This means essentially a full day downtime. At the same time a dCache update for the ATLAS and CMS SE is planned, which is schedule for the 17th and 18th. The experiments have not objections. Maybe the work group server can be accessible most of the time on the 17th, but batch system and dCache will be missing. The first requests of changing the VO for user account occurred. The preferred solution by the NAF admins is to delete/expire the old account and create a new account. This means that the user needs to take care of saving data from his old account. This allows to find data on the scratch disc from expired accounts. It is also possible to change the group of the user account and hence keeping the home directory as it is. This needs some more work on the NAF admin site and therefore is disfavoured by the NAF admins. In both cases it is essential to inform the old VO admins about the change so that they can take appropriate actions as deleting data or restricting the account. It is unclear how to do this for the first case. In the second case, a NAF admin is needed and he can inform the old VO. As a reminder: A user can have only one account per VO. A user can have accounts from more than one VO, which means that the user will have different login names for the different VOs. This can be set up with one certificate. There is no need to get another certificate. 5. AOB: Some ILC users are not using the registration web service but supplying the needed information directly. This is disfavoured as it needs more work than the web service. The ILC contacts should spread this information in their community. ILC should provide some documentation for their users.