Meeting Notes for 9 December

Present: Joel, Liz, Bob, Mark, Edit, Ken

Time-of-flight

• Edit has done a ton of debugging and has fixed the 500,000-event limit on the tutorial.
• Edit will roll out the tutorial code to (www18? i2u2-prod?) at midnight on Thursday (the 10th).
• For reference: midweek rollouts to production are challenging, since active users are more likely. It's generally not recommended, but Edit A) knows what she's doing and B) wants to get code deployed before the holiday.

ANL power outage

A power outage at Argonne took down the i2u2 machines unexpectedly and caused general problems.

• The machines restart automatically, but order is important and not regulated. This time, www18 restarted first and automatically tried to mount data4, which had not yet restarted. Thus, it never mounted data4 and analyses remained broken even after the website was otherwise restored.
• The fstab script will mount everything necessary on the development and production servers, fixing the above problems manually
• Cosmic needs a folder called /scratch, which is a softlink to a directory with a mounted hard drive because (I think) /scratch needs to be larger than the limit on directory size. This was not mounted by fstab. Edit fixed this problem.
• This will not be a problem once we're operating out of the Notre Dame CRC (soon...), so Joel will not bother moving this info into the general documentation where it would otherwise belong.

e-Labs

• Still having some problems with GPS coordinates - Liz suggests emailing users to encourage them to check and correct their numbers.
• Edit has prepared a fix to allow Teachers to force-logout student groups (special thanks to Liz for testing). It's been deployed to i2u2-dev under the Registration tab for Teachers, and she led the group through its use.
• This fix will be rolled out to production Thursday night (the 10th)
• * www13.i2u2.org is now officially retired! All development henceforth should be done on i2u2-dev.crc.nd.edu *

Help Desk

• Edit wants to go live with i2u2-prod.crc.nd.edu by the end of February. This will require new Help Desk code.
• The current Help Desk code relies on old PHP and does not meet CRC standards. Joel will rewrite it in JSP/Java.

Development

• Now that i2u2-dev is active, it needs comprehensive testing before it is deployed live as i2u2-prod.
• Ken will test CIMA and (with Tom) the CMS event display and other e-Lab functions
• The Cosmic Fellows will test the Cosmic Ray e-Lab
• Who will test the LIGO e-Lab?

Drupal

• The Drupal site is made with Drupal 6, and it will need to be upgraded to 7 or 8 before it can operate from CRC servers. Drupal 6 is at end-of-life and will not be supported after Feb. 2016, and it requires outdated PHP that is below CRC standards. How this will proceed is uncertain. Marge will communicate with Xenomedia to determine the best arrangement; expect updates by the next telecon.

Webforms

• Liz was able to get permission from Fermilab to host Ken's webform there, if it's needed soon.
• There's an Education and Outreach webform on the site currently, so it may be possible that the functionality is already there. Otherwise, the Webform module can be installed once the larger Drupal issue (see above) is settled.

TWiki & Bugzilla

• TWiki should probably go on its own VM at ND. Joel will research and contact the CRC.
• We should also move Bugzilla. Joel with check with the Fermilab Service Desk to see if it might be hosted there, or if ND would be better.

Geometry

• There were hitches to Joel rolling out Sudha's geometry updates to www13, it turned out, but they don't matter because www13 no longer matters.
• Joel rolled out Sudha's geometry updates to i2u2-dev with no apparent hitches.

-- Main.jgriffith - 2015-12-10