Minutes of NAF User Committee meeting from 08.04.2009 
-----------------------------------------------------

Present/Phone: Wolfgang Ehrenfeld (ATLAS), Andreas Gellrich (NAF),
Carsten Hof (CMS), Yves Kemp (IT), Hartmut Stadie (CMS), Jan Erik
Sundermann (ATLAS), Alexey Zhelezov (LHCb)

Excused: Johan Blouw (LHCb), Andreas Haupt (IT), Kai Leffhalm (NAF)

1. News from the Chair

No news from Grid Project Board or Analysis Centre.

There is no need for a face-to-face meeting next month. The next
face-to-face meeting will be in October 2009 in Hamburg.


2. Action items:

Details of the clean up script (/tmp):

Will be run automatically when sudo infrastructure is ready.


SL5 update:

The DESY Hamburg CE will be migrated to SL5 around June 1st. The NAF
admins would also like to migrate the NAF systems around the same
time. The machine tcx035 is running SL5 already. All experiments
should test if their software can run/compile on this system in order
to check for missing package etc. Feedback until the next meeting in
May. It is planned to migrate the batch nodes as soon as possible if
there are no problems. The experiments should present a migration
scenario for their work group server.

Official certification of experiments software for SL5 is done by
the experiments.


VO support allowed to monitor user job parameters:

The VO support is able to look at all the job parameters using the NAF
batch monitoring web pages of all users within their VO.


root or sudo access to work group server:

There will be no general root or sudo access to the NAF work group
servers. Running a few scripts using sudo can be discussed on a case
by case basis.


3. Status report:

Status report was given by Yves. See the agenda for the report.
Below a few highlights from the discussion are listed:

 - ssh connection lost: This could be due to network latencies. The
   experiments should inform their users. In case of problems the
   user should inform naf-helpdesk@desy.de immediately.

 - automatic proxy prolongation is in a testing phase. Default role is
   /atlas/de, /cms/dcms, /lhcb and /ilc/de. /calice/de needs some
   configuration. The experiments should test it and give
   feedback. Instructions are at
   http://naf.desy.de/general_naf_docu/first_steps/#e43414

 
4. gsidcap:

CMS did some detailed comparison of dcap and gsidcap access. Within
the errors there is no difference in access time. Although only one
file per job was access. Their Lazy file stage is still faster by 20%.


5. Lustre status:

A new lustre instance for ATLAS and LHCb is setup at Zeuthen and under
testing. Production status can be reached either in weeks or
months. 

ATLAS is in need of more Lustre space and would like to use quotas.

CMS prefers their Lustre space at Hamburg, LHCb at Zeuthen. No
comments from ILC as no members there.


6. Data transfers from/to NAF:

After some discussion the NAF admins will prepare some guidelines or
transfer matrix for common use cases:

 - transfer from local SE to remote SE
 - transfer from local disk to remote SE
 - transfer from local disk to remote disk

for small, medium and large data volumes.


7. AOB:

ATLAS and others requested if it is possible to get an automatic
answer with the ticket number, when posting to naf-helpdesk@desy.de.