CERN COMPUTER NEWSLETTER
CERN COMPUTERNEWSLETTERVolume 41, issue 5November–December 2006ContentsEditorialUDS provides help to users1Computing featured in this month’s CERN Courier2CNL archiveComputing at CERN from the 1990s to the Grid era 3Announcements & newsCERN mail service requires secure protocols4Printing of banner pages to cease4Discovery Monday profiles the Grid4E-mail addresses at CERN5Technical briefVirtual servers cut hosting costs and offer flexibility 6LCG newsGetting Grids to work together: interoperation iskey to sharing8CERN openlab student reports on LCG experience9Conference reportsEGEE’06 debates future of Grid10Digital library solutions employ Grid technology11Openlab event promotes entrepreneurship11CERN is host to EuroPython 200611Desktop computingPrinting at CERN: procedures for each operatingsystem12Information cornerLet Kerberos guard your password15Known issues for Pine mail client users on Linux15Users can gain access to AIS with NICE password 16Calendar16Editors Nicole Crémel and Hannelore Hämmerle, CERN IT Department,1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland. E-mail: cnl.editor@cern.ch. Fax: 41 (22) 7668500.Web: cerncourier.com/articles/cnl.Advisory board Wolfgang von Rüden (head of IT Department), François Grey (ITCommunication team leader), Christine Sutton (CERN Courier editor), Tim Smith(group leader, User and Document Services).Produced for CERN by Institute of Physics PublishingDirac House, Temple Back, Bristol BS1 6BE, UK. Tel: 44 (0)117 929 7481.E-mail: jo.nicholas@iop.org. Fax: 44 (0)117 920 0733. Web: iop.org.Published by CERN IT Department 2006 CERNThe contents of this newsletter donot necessarily represent the viewsof CERN management.CERN Computer Newsletter November–December 2006UDS provideshelp to usersThe human face of the CERN helpdesk forms a small part of the desktopsupport team, managed by the UDS group and staffed by the firm Serco.The User and Document Services(UDS) group in the IT departmentprovides a range of support toCERN users, from managing thehelpdesk to enabling openaccess to scientific publications.CNL spoke to Tim Smith, theleader of UDS group, about itsactivities and future plans.Can you outline the scope of theservices that UDS provides?We are a multifaceted groupthat covers many domains.The driving projects on thedocument services side rangefrom the CERN Document Server(CDS), where there are nowmore than 900 000 bibliographicrecords and full-text documents,to the copyediting service forCERN reports. We also supportpaper production activities suchas producing CERN reports,running the printshop, andmaintaining printers, copiers,faxes and scanners on site. Togive you an idea of the scale,the printshop produces some20 million pages of documentseach year, printers produceanother 30 million pages andcopiers about 10 million.Then there is the conferencingside of things: we organizemeetings and attach documentsand minutes to theseelectronically with the productIndico. We also support CERN’spresence in the Virtual RoomsVideoconferencing System(VRVS) and contribute to theworldwide VRVS infrastructure,as well as manage most of thevideoconference rooms on site.We organized some 7711 Indicobased events and 3220 VRVSsessions during the first ninemonths of this year.We also run all of the auditoria,which entails operator support,maintaining the equipment,taking audio transcriptions ofcommittee meetings, andrecording seminars andconferences. UDS also filmsmajor events at CERN, which isan important part of theorganization’s heritage.When it comes to user support,the main activities are userregistration, and managementof the central helpdesk andsite-wide desktop supportthrough an external contractor.Overseeing the contract is an1
Editorialactive role for CERN; it includessupplying the general manageron duty, and monitoring andtraining helpdesk staff to ensurethat replies are consistent andreliable. The helpdesk receivesabout 1200 calls each week, sothis is a significant task.Added to that the group stillmanages the bookshop, which isnow located in the main libraryin building 52. And, of course,we also provide editorialsupport for CNL.You mentioned user registration –how do you see that evolving?One of our visions is to automatethe process of user registrationso that most of it movesupstream – in other words,users can prepare most of theregistration process before theycome to CERN. This will makethe organization appear muchmore efficient and professional.We would also like to eliminatethe use of paper. This wouldmean ensuring that the processis based on an electronicsignature that is integrated intoother parts of registration withHuman Resources.What is the status of the scientificpublishing service?Since CERN’s inception we havepublished the well known CERNYellow Report series todisseminate technical reportsand the proceedings of ourschools and workshops. Atpresent the in-house copyeditingteam is not big enough toprovide the general publishingservice of the past, therefore itis concentrating on continuingthe production of the YellowReports, which are popular andwidely supported.We have seen a push to rationalizethe use of fax machines at CERNrecently. What about printers?For a long time we have had aloosely managed park of printersat CERN, with many differentactors buying, operating andmaintaining the devices. We wantto encourage a more proactiveapproach, where we can reducethe variety, keep things moreup-to-date, guarantee a qualityof service, and profit fromdevelopments in the outsideworld in terms of multifunctionalmachines that can print, copy,scan to e-mail and so on. Weaim to develop a proposal for2this over the next few monthsand implement it next year.What are the plans for Indico?We want to make Indico the hubfor managing all meetings,which means that all subsidiarysystems – videoconferencing,audio conferencing, roombooking and so on – will becentralized through a singleinterface. For example, you canalready ensure that a meetingyou are planning in Indico isexported automatically to yourpersonal calendar. Similarly, youcan book a subsidiary VRVSsession directly from Indico,rather than having to do it inVRVS. We’re doing similar thingsto the e-dial system for audioconferencing, and have a majordevelopment under way tointegrate the conference roombooking system, which willprobably become a module ofIndico in the future.In your view, what is the future ofvideoconferencing at CERN?We recently set up an H323service, which is the commercialoffering for IP-basedvideoconferencing. It is an openstandard so many manufacturersare making compatible hardwareand software. It is also a highquality standard, which meansthat the end devices tend to bemore expensive than simplewebcams. CERN is collaboratingwith the French National Instituteof Nuclear Physics and ParticlePhysics (IN2P3) in Lyon on thisproject, and the centralizationunit is being housed at IN2P3.VRVS is today the moredynamic, self-learninginfrastructure, and it can supportmore capacity and many moreend devices. This will remainpopular in the particle physicscommunity because the cost ofjoining is lower. But as H323becomes more commerciallywidespread the difference couldbecome less significant andmore HEP users might beattracted. We are now equippingthe conference rooms with highquality H323-compatibleequipment. We are not droppingsupport for VRVS, juststandardizing on a set ofequipment that can supportboth technologies.Why this change? And how is therole of CDS evolving?The CDS software is becomingincreasingly popular at externalsites, and some of these arenow contributing to thedevelopment of the software.For example, EPFL in Lausanneis a significant contributor. Toreflect this broader developmentand use we rebranded the CDSsoftware as Invenio. This alsoclearly indicates that it is a sisterproduct to Indico, which originallymeant Integrated DigitalConferencing and also means“to announce” in Latin. Inveniomeans “to find, to discover” inLatin. We will still refer to CDSas the CERN instance of Invenio.There has been muchdevelopment of CDS recently. Inparticular we have gone througha major phase of consolidation,changing the underlyingsoftware to Python and thusrefreshing the code base. Wesee a period of expansionahead. There has been a strongpush from the CERN library andthe directorate to make CERN’sinstitutional repository the focusof all information at CERN, andto discourage the reliance onsubsidiary storage systems andwebsites for storing physics andadministration documents.Of course, there is a separateEngineering Data ManagementService (EDMS) system fordesign and engineeringdocuments. We have carried outan assessment with the EDMSteam, and we see clear reasonsfor having product life-cyclemanagement in EDMS that wedo not need in CDS, so mergingthese two technologies is noton the cards.With this proviso, the aimnow is to ensure that everyonedeposits information in CDS, andthat all of the data is interlinkedand can be found efficiently. Aspart of the expansion phaseahead we are modifying thearchitecture for the servers tomake them more scalable, andat the same time increasing theserver base. The number ofdocuments in CDS is growing atover 100 000 per year, and wehave recently absorbed manyWeb archives into the server.Finally, a key role for CDS inthe future is to give theorganization the necessary toolsto implement the open-accesspolicy to scientific literature,which the CERN library isspearheading with the directorgeneral’s support.Computing featured inthis month’s CERN CourierThe articles listed below appearin the November 2006 issue ofCERN Courier. Full-text articlesand the rest of the issue’scontents are available atwww.cerncourier.com.Computing News EGEE gets down to businessOSG receives 30 m for scientificcomputing collaboration KnowARC project gets goingGRIDtoday honours CERN ande-Science LHC@home moves its base tothe UK W3C to support more languagesin voice applications Calendar of eventsJefferson Lab attracts recordnumbers to Geant4 workshop Feature articleSymposium focuses on scientificsupercomputing The CERN Document Server softwarehas recently been renamed Invenio. CNL celebrates 40 years of newsCERN Computer Newsletter November–December 2006
CNL archiveComputing at CERN fromthe 1990s to the Grid eraWe are now reaching the endof our journey through thearchive to celebrate CNL’s 40thanniversary. Last issue welooked at the Web revolutionthat took place in the nineties,and this issue we will cover theperiod from the early 1990s until2002, when references to theGrid start to appear. Again wewill reproduce extracts ofarticles that were publishedduring that time.The first Web version of CNLwas published in October–December 1993. You can accessthis issue at http://cern.ch/cnlart/214. URLs are alsoprovided so that you canretrieve the full stories of thefollowing excerpts.Evolving CERN computing strategyand changes in CN’s structure“Recent years have seen arevolution in industry’s approachto building and marketingcomputer systems and in theways people use them. This hasbeen characterized by a trendaway from large monolithicsystems whose high cost mustbe amortized over many usersand towards a more distributed,scalable and personalizedapproach, based on compactCMOS machines manufacturedin large volume with the benefitsof a vastly improved price/performance ratio.”David Williams, head of CNdivision (which preceded theIT department).(October–December w with Knuth on softwaretools and techniques“Donald E Knuth is consideredby many to be the world’spreeminent computer scientist.Knuth has also developedbreakthrough applications incomputer typesetting (TeX andMETAFONT) and softwaredevelopment (WEB), and has over100 publications to his credit.Renovation of the Computer Centre in 2003. Half of the equipment inthe ground floor room has been removed to prepare for the PC farms.Above: View of the computerroom, building 513, in 1998.Right: The PC farm for the Grid inthe Computer Centre as it is today.Interviewer: What about objectoriented programming? Is it justa current buzzword, or does thisapproach appeal to you?Knuth: I’ve always thought ofprogramming in that way, but Ihaven’t used languages thathelp enforce the discipline; I’vealways enforced the disciplinemyself in other languages. Theproblem that I have with themtoday is that. C is toocomplicated. At the moment,it’s impossible for me to writeCERN Computer Newsletter November–December 2006portable code that I believewould work on lots of differentsystems, unless I avoid all exoticfeatures. But each user of C has a favourite subset, andthat’s fine. CWEB fully supportsC as well as C.”(April–June 1994,http://cern.ch/cnlart/216)Crack, a password checking serviceat CERN“Passwords are the primarysecurity loophole on a system. Ifusers have guessable passwordsthen ‘bad guys’ can use theiraccounts without beingdetected. These intruders cancause damage to the individualuser and also to other users.The use of security tools likeKerberos or shadow passwordsare not sufficient since the‘crackers’ can still try to guesspasswords.The only really safe solutionis to make users aware of thedangers and understand thefollowing: why it’s dangerous to haveguessable passwords (for themand for CERN); how to choose a goodpassword.However, some guessablepasswords will always be usedand conscientious systemadministrators should try toreduce the number of users witha guessable password. This is thepurpose of the ‘Crack service’.”(July–December 1995,http://cern.ch/cnlart/221)The “Year 2000” problem: themillennium bug“The millennium bug is notsome exotic insect, but an errorthat is lurking in computerprograms, waiting for the chimesof midnight on 31 December1999, before emerging to bite us– hard. Even as the champagnecorks are popping to herald inthe last year of the secondmillennium, planes will start tofall from the sky, lifts will stopworking, banks will stop payingcorrect interest, and society ingeneral will grind to a halt – orso the story goes.To illustrate what the fuss isabout, consider an early sign ofthe bug’s presence. In 1993, alorry carrying a consignment ofcorned beef attempted to deliverits load to a British supermarket.Corned beef has a shelf life ofseven years, but when thesupermarket’s computer tried tocheck this, instead of subtracting1993 from 2000 to get seven, it3
CNL archive / Announcements & newsperformed truncated arithmetic,subtracting 93 from 00, to give–93! The load was refused (butaccepted manually).”(June–September 1997,http://cern.ch/cnlart/228/art milb.html)Remote/mobile computing at CERN“With the growing number ofportable computers, palmtopsand mobile phones, as well asthe need to keep in touch withCERN not only from home butalso whilst on business travel,a coordination activity has beenstarted in IT Division forremote/mobile computing.”(July–September 1998,http://cern.ch/cnlart/232/art mobcomp.html)A new mail address for SPAMcomplaints“Following a de facto standardin the Internet world a newcontact address at CERN hasbeen defined for matters relatedto unsolicited bulk mail (SPAM).Please direct your questions orcomplaints concerning SPAM toabuse@cern.ch.This will allow us to share thework load more efficiently.”(January–March 1999,http://cern.ch/cnlart/234/art spam.html)SHIFT software evolution: CASTOR“In January 1999 CERN beganto develop CASTOR (CERNAdvanced STORage manager).It is an evolution of SHIFT, whichhas been used at CERN for allexperiments in the 1990s.CASTOR is more scalable thanSHIFT and should be able tohandle data for the overlappingrun of the NA48 and COMPASSexperiments, the latterstarting in 2000.”(October–December uropean DataGrid projectdemonstrated successfully“On Friday 1 March, the EUfunded DataGrid projectsuccessfully passed the firstyear review performed byexternal experts appointed bythe European Union.In late 1990, a CERN computerscientist invented the WorldWide Web to facilitate exchangeof information betweenscientists working on differentcomputers, perhaps at differentsites. At the EU review, CERN,along with DataGrid projectpartners INFN/CNAF (Bologna,Italy), CNRS/IN2P3 (Lyon,France), PPARC/RAL (UK), andFOM/NIKHEF (Amsterdam/NL),demonstrated the first DataGridtest bed. The WWW is mainlyaimed at the exchange ofinformation while the Grid isconcerned with the exchange ofcomputer power, data storage,and accessing large databases,without forcing users to searchfor these resources. Once‘connected’ to the Grid, the enduser will see it essentially asone large computer system.For these reasons, manybelieve the Grid to be the mostpractical solution to the socalled data intensive scienceproblem that must be overcomeif the computing needs ofscientific communities suchas processing of physics datafrom LHC experiments are tobe satisfied.”(January–March 2002,http://cern.ch/cnlart/2002/001/datagrid)CERN mail service requires secure protocolsInsecure access to central e-mailservers on the MMM (My Mail andMore) service was closed on2 October. This came after severalcampaigns to enforce the use ofsecure e-mail protocols (see theApril–May issue of CNL).There are three main changesto the mail service: Encryption is required whenreading messages from a mailclient using the POP or IMAPprotocol. Detailed instructionson how to enable this securityoption for Pine, Mac.Mail andMozilla/Thunderbird clientsare available at http://cern.ch/mmmservices/Help/?kbid 191040. CERN clientspreconfigured to OutlookXP/2003 are not affected becausethey use a different protocol. Authentication and a validsender address are requiredwhen posting messages from amail client using the CERN SMTPservice. Valid addresses for eachperson are defined in the CERNComputing ResourcesAdministration (CRA) system.See http://cern.ch/mmmservices/Help/?kbid 191060 for detailsof how to check your validaddresses. This page alsoexplains how to enable anotherperson to send messages usingyour e-mail address. Anonymous posting is stillsupported for cron jobs, scriptsand internal mail servers (withrestrictions). These insecureconnections are only possibleusing a dedicated server,cernmx.cern.ch (see http://cern.ch/mmmservices/Help/?kbid 191010). Posting istemporarily denied for amachine when it reaches certainthresholds: 3000 mails per dayor 50 external recipients (not@cern.ch) per day. Machinesthat need to be above thesethresholds can be white listed.People who use Pine shouldalso read “Known issues for Pinemail client users on Linux” on p15.The CERN Mail team wouldlike to thank all of the users andmachine owners who haveupdated their mail settings tocomply with this new policy.These changes will greatlyreduce the risk of maliciousprograms (such as spambotsand viruses) sending unsolicitede-mails over the Internet via theCERN mail servers.The CERN Mail teamPrinting of banner pages to ceaseDiscovery Monday profiles the GridThe printing of banner pageshas been disabled under thenew infrastructure to reducepaper consumption. Statisticsshow that the average print jobsize is small, and paper savingsof up to 20% could be made bynot printing the banner page.As each printer is moved tothe new infrastructure, bannerpage printing will be disabled.The helpdesk can re-enablebanner page printing uponrequest for corridor printers thatare shared by several users. Wehope that ultimately the printingof banner pages will be enabledon fewer than 10% of printersSome 150 members of thegeneral public attended aDiscovery Monday event aboutthe Grid, held at CERN’sMicrocosm on 2 October.The visitors watched a shortpresentation about the Grid andits relation to CERN, and aboutthe huge data challenge posedby the Large Hadron Colliderexperiments. Staff from the ITdepartment then gave severalinteractive presentations.One presentation about Gridmonitoring tools provided avisually impressive sense of theglobal collabora
CERN Computer Newsletter November–December 2006 1 Editorial UDS provides help to users 1 Computing featured in this month’s CERN Courier 2 . 2002, when references to the Grid start to appear. Again we will reproduce e
(mailto:cern.reception@cern.ch) cern.reception@cern.ch 41 (0)22 767 76 76 European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN,CH-1211 Genève 23, Switzerland Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, F-01631 CERN Cedex, France Lat N: 46.2314284 Long E: 6.0539718 R
They are prepared with one of the CAD systems used at CERN and they are formatted in accordance with the appropriate CERN design standards, [ 3], [ 4 ], [5].! A copy of the native CAD data is transferred to CERN and stored in the corresponding CERN CAD database. The transfer to CERN of the CAD data shall take place before drawings are released. -
CERN PS”, CERN/PS 2000-038 (RF) References. 2 J. Belleman - CERN A new trajectory measurement system for the CERN PS Booster CB TT2 TT70 East hall LEIR North hall Linac II South hall Y Radi
CERN decided to link journal article references directly to the e-journal site, whenever available to CERN members. The scope of the project covers all of the CERN Document Server, which not only contains documents from ArXiv but also many
CERN IT Department CH-1211 Genève 23 Switzerland www.cern.ch/it Databases for the CERN LHC: Techniques and Lessons Lear
CERN’S Song of Death In CERN part 5 we looked at the Opera film SYMMETRY and equated it with Shiva’s Dance of Death. The main singer in SYMMETRY is Claron Mcfadden and one of her other roles happens to be “Lilith”. Mcfadde
world for many years. CERN started its adventure to study the subatomic world in 1954, with The Netherlands as one of its founding members. Today, the Holland@CERN event welcomes the continuous interest and visibility of Dutch government, industry and science in this laboratory. CERN has man
Graeme falls in love with Barbara Allan. He is so lovesick that he is bound to his deathbed. When Barbara comes to visit her ailing lover, she reminds him that he slighted her in front of others at a local tavern. He dies, and then she feels guilty, so she asks her mother to prepare her deathbed for the following day. The message might be that one doesn’t need to take love for granted, or it .
