news

hfgh

[phpwiki]
We've put together a [weblogin demo page|http://lab.ac.uab.edu/node/view/145] that highlights the single-sign on feature of weblogin and the ability to secure different documents using weblogin.

It would probably be good to have an advanced set of examples that highlights some of the sublte configuration choices available to the web site administrator

There had been a problem using the new weblogin server with metric, a redhat 7.3 box. This was preventing us from using the new login server.

This problem was resolved today, with a lot of help from the pubcookie folks. You can follow the thread here:

http://mailman.u.washington.edu/pipermail/pubcookie-users/2004-April/000374.html

The problem had been traced to a build issue with the compiler version on rh7.3 (gcc 2.96) by some folks at the U. of Newcastle upon Tyne. The fix was to build mod_pubcookie with out the compiler optimization.

Anyway, this is great news and I'm happy it's working.

Some minutes from the meeting:

* Reviewed our 3 goals for basic functionality in the demo.

## resource availability
## job submission
## file transfer.

These are basic functions in any computing experience and are the aspects of the Grid which set it apart from other environments.

* Zach identified 4 areas of on going attention and evaluation

## Tool Support

This includes things like ogce and gridport integration, condor-g v. globus job run, etc.
## Application Support

This includes things like MPI availability, work flow tools, etc.
## Resource Availability

Basically how we add additional resource into our computation pool

That is strange. I created an entry here yesterday and it has not showed up. Anyway it was about the GrEnaDE Project (Grid Enabled Desktop Environment) where they plan to interface with the entire grid world through KDE. Though they have not released any software, they seem to be working on a sleek idea. You can find their project page here http://mrccs.man.ac.uk/research/grenade/
I have been going through their sourceforge stuff and they are still in the phase of planning after a year. I could not see any designs also.

I've updated our taxonomy for the site a little. This primarily affects the order of the taggable items you see when submitting content.

*The "section" vocabulary is now listed first (this reflects it's importance in tagging content). For example, this is a "news" item.
*The "project" vocabulary is second because most of the time you should be working on something related to a project. Please classify your entries. (If you think a project is missing, let me know)
*Finally, our old "nmi" section has been renamed to "tools" to better reflect its function. These terms will reflect what tools relate to the item being posted.

We got our IIS server pubcookie enabled today. We had to deal with similar cert format issues as with the login server. Also had to adjust some of the instructutions.

Followup posts for the openssl controls and updates to iis install instructions are needed.

I resolved the remaining problems with the certificate formats and configuration and now the test login server is operational. Getting to this point promises to make supporting a robust configuration possible.

Tomorrow I'll post some documentation about openssl. The key is: read the man pages.

I've created a small Condor Pool.

The master (nori) is running on a VM.My workstation (ceviche) is the only other machine part of the pool. The following "screenshot" shows three jobs that were submitted. Two are running on one of my workstations idle processors. The other is runningon the VM (I've got to disable this, no one should be computing on the VM)

Name OpSys Arch State Activity LoadAv Mem ActvtyTime
vm1@ceviche.l LINUX INTEL Unclaimed Idle 0.000 851
vm2@ceviche.l LINUX INTEL Claimed Busy 0.000 851
vm3@ceviche.l LINUX INTEL Claimed Busy 0.000 851

I spoke with Jim today about the state of the drupal, shib integration, and the state of the cms.

We concluded that the state of the art isn't that great. You either get all or nothing from a vendor/system. It's very hard to do best of breed integration: combining tools that do their function well into a unified whole.

DoIT is already running a [collection of tools| http://arch.doit.wisc.edu/jim/sites.html] for publishing ([geeklog|http://www.geeklog.net/]), bloging ([blosxom|http://www.blosxom.com/]), and tasking ([tasks|http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/tasks/content.php]) and turned to drupal in hope for some integration of these and leverage of some existing modules like project. Ran into limitation of poor granularity of authz on objects in drupal. There is some effort/desire in durpal community for finer grain access but it does seem to be going anywhere.