Birmingham site report

Lawrie Lowe

HEP System Managers’ Meeting,RAL,1st July 2004

Farm hardware

• Alice Farm: 18 dual 800 MHz PC boxes

• BaBar Farm: 40 dual 800 MHz blades

• Atlas Farm: 38 dual 2.0 GHz blades

• Upgrades to Atlas Farm ?

• Currently housed in room with 25kW of cooling

Farm systems

• Alice and Atlas farms running RedHat 7.3

• BaBar farm running RedHat 7.2

• Issue of maintenance of BaBar farms and upgrades of BaBar software

• Atlas farm split into local part and LCG-2 part at present

Desktops

• Around 40 user-desktop PCs plus around 12 PCs in various labs/rooms

• All but 2 user-desktops running RedHat 9

• 2 user-desktops running Windows XP

• The other PCs running Linux or Windows as required

Laptops

• 9 laptops in a group Pool

• Half-a-dozen user laptops (mainly students)

• All laptops are behind an extra level of ‘firewall’ to the outside world

Servers

• Mixture of old and new general purpose Linux servers, with RedHat 9 and newer systems to be trialled (Fedora 2, and RHEL clones)

• Citrix Windows Terminal Server(s) for those required MS applications.

Admin

• All Linux systems centrally administered (by me)

• Windows systems dual-admin’d with owner

• User laptops self-admin’d (hence the extra mostly-deny ‘firewall’)

Networking

• Gigabit to the newer servers, 100Mb/s to desktop (but gig interfaces on our new PCs)

• 2 Gbits/s for the dept to rest of campus• Campus firewall expected to adopt default-

deny policy • But - no extra I.S. personnel and history of

delayed response to problems because of under-manning

Question – site firewall policy at other sites?

• Default allow

• Default deny incoming

• Default deny incoming/outgoing

• Difficulties for grid/video-conferencing?