= Attendees =
Lars, Paul, Ian
= Minutes =
Paul asked about the ARM crate from Ian Campbell, which is currently
in the Citrix office.
ACTION Ian Jackson will send Paul the installation instructions for
review so that they can be fixed while we have the crate here.
Paul reported that serial adapter leads (RJ45-DB9) for the Comtrol
panels are not commercially available. All-Net has modified 26 of the
leads we were supplied and they will be individually tested before
installation.
Paul had been intending to split up each pair of identical test
servers, with one of each in the top half and one in the bottom half
of the rack. Paul has racked the two physically identical main
servers with a gap in between for the 4U ARM crate, contrary to the
previously agreed configuration.
This is not desirable. Identical machines should be adjacent.
One of each test would have been connected to newcastle's serial panel
and one to gateshead. But we want them all connected to newcastle, so
that we can replug the Comtrol panel if newcastle fails. All the test
servers are to be connected to newcastle's Comtrol panel, as shown in
the plumbing.txt diagram.
Agreements:
The following arrangement was agreed instead, from top to bottom:
* External 8-port switch
* Internal switch
* Comtrol serial panel for newcastle
* Comtrol serial panel for gateshead
* Some test servers, in pairs; in each pair, 0 on top,
followed by 1
* All the spare space
* 4U ARM crate
* newcastle
* gateshead
* The remaining test servers, again in pairs,
within each pair 0 being above 1
ACTION Paul to move existing equipment as necessary.
The AMD servers line Item #13 rimava0 and rimava1 have a problem. It
does not appear that the BIOS supports serial redirection. The
machine is an AMD FX-6300 directly from AMD with an MSI BIOS. Ian
suggested that perhaps serial redirection was permanently enabled.
ACTION Paul
to check this today with a laptop
ACTION If that doesn't work, Lars to talk to AMD people on working
group to try to put Paul into contact with appropriate
support people at AMD.
Paul reported that he was having trouble accessing the spreadsheet
containing the machine names etc. Ian resent Paul the link
again and walked Paul through opening the file from the gitweb page.
Ian is away
19th December
23rd December to 1st January inclusive
Paul and Lars and Don are going to be away much of this time too.
We agreed that it would be good for Paul to be able to ask Ian
questions to improve communications and avoid any further need for
rework.
ACTION Ian to provide Paul with an email address which will be useable
to contact Ian while he's away.
Ian would like login details for newcastle and gateshead ASAP.
ACTION Paul to chase Don to provide these to Ian today.
Paul asked about coordination of physical server move with remote
software (re)configuration. It was agreed that Paul and Don would
need to liase. But there is no need to notify Ian about rebooting or
powering off the server under Ian's feet as Ian does not intend to
make changes to the configuration over the Christmas and New Year
period.
