From roman@npac.syr.edu Mon Jun 30 17:30:48 1997 Date: Sun, 22 Jun 1997 15:01:31 -0400 From: Roman Markowski To: balsoy@merkury.npac.syr.edu, dbhatia@merkury.npac.syr.edu, mrosario@merkury.npac.syr.edu, bki5@merkury.npac.syr.edu, akieun@merkury.npac.syr.edu, yhkim@merkury.npac.syr.edu, shko@merkury.npac.syr.edu, mjlee@merkury.npac.syr.edu, tapulika@merkury.npac.syr.edu, deepak@merkury.npac.syr.edu, proman@merkury.npac.syr.edu, stach@merkury.npac.syr.edu, thlin@merkury.npac.syr.edu, srajesh@merkury.npac.syr.edu, yuzhu@merkury.npac.syr.edu, BRA1@merkury.npac.syr.edu, tolson@merkury.npac.syr.edu, njasper@merkury.npac.syr.edu, lruppert@merkury.npac.syr.edu, kathy@merkury.npac.syr.edu, roman@merkury.npac.syr.edu, remek@merkury.npac.syr.edu, davew@merkury.npac.syr.edu, wen@merkury.npac.syr.edu, bartw@merkury.npac.syr.edu, zgs@merkury.npac.syr.edu, trscavo@merkury.npac.syr.edu, walczak@merkury.npac.syr.edu, edlipson@syr.edu, toma@merkury.npac.syr.edu, roman@merkury.npac.syr.edu, njm@merkury.npac.syr.edu, konrad@merkury.npac.syr.edu, cwou@merkury.npac.syr.edu, marek@merkury.npac.syr.edu, piotr@merkury.npac.syr.edu, bernhold@merkury.npac.syr.edu, dbc@merkury.npac.syr.edu, gcheng@merkury.npac.syr.edu, paulc@merkury.npac.syr.edu, gcf@merkury.npac.syr.edu, furm@merkury.npac.syr.edu, jguo@merkury.npac.syr.edu, haupt@merkury.npac.syr.edu, scott@merkury.npac.syr.edu, lxm@merkury.npac.syr.edu Cc: roman@merkury.npac.syr.edu Subject: support for services and demos Ladies and Gentlemen, More than a month ago I sent the message (attached below) asking for technical description of servers/services/demos you designed and and implemented in NPAC. I am sorry to say but my request was completely ignored. I understand that putting together a technical documentation is sometimes not an easy task but please do not treat it also as a total waste of time. Techical documentation would help systems team to support and maintain your servers and services. It would help in short-term planning and designing changes in our networking infrastructure. It would also help to avoid frustration during demos which fail because some components are missing and nobody can restart them immediately. It would be also nice to have demos which can be run by most people in NPAC, not only by authors. Technical documentation revealing all details of a service setup is as important as design and its implementation. I repeat what I said before > I would like to achieve a kind of agreement. Systems will > support with high priority only services that have appropriate > description, available for them. Up to now systems team hasn't gotten any description and as far as I know only Gang is working on complete description of his services. regards roman Roman Markowski wrote: > > Ladies and Gentlemen, > > I hear from time to time complaints that some important services > built by our researchers do not receive appropriate attention > from systems and/or some services are maintained in a poor way. > The reason is simple: we do not have sufficient information > from researches and students about servers and services they > create as well as current and future hardware/software requirements. > > From systems point of view there are three categories of services > built by our researchers : > A. services which successfully went through experimental > phase, obtained acceptance, and now should be maintained by systems > and run in stable, conservative way (e.g. Carrier) > B. services which are treated as experimental but important for > demos and presentations. Systems should know about their existance, > know how to restart and test their functionality > C. services not important and not maintained, or being in an > initial stage of construction. Systems should be aware > of the process of creating such services because they can > help to choose the optimal platform with appropriate hardware > and software configuration. > > From my perspective almost all our web/oracle/java/etc services > belong to category "C". Systems has insufficient information > to run/restart/restore/maintain without wasting a lot of time. > Systems group has no information whatsoever about existance, > functionality and requirements of some of such services. They can > learn about some servers and services only when they are "dead" and must > be restarted immediately. > > If you expect systems to maintain your experimental service (demo) > and upgrade from category "C" to "B" > please, please deliver the following information: > > 1. DESCRIPTION > one-two sentences explaining what is the purpose of the service > title of the related project; > URL and some specific key-wards for this service > 2. CONTACT > who is responsible for the service > who else know details > 3. RESOURCES > what machine(s) are used > disk space (current and future requirements) > memory > number of processes > 4. DEPENDENCES > other web servers required to run the service > other non-web services (oracle, news, etc) > special software required ? (version or patch level) > 5. DETAILED PROCEDURE > how to start the service (what used id?) > how to stop service > how to test if it works correctly > how to maintain (backups?, disk space cleaning?) > 6. ADDITIONAL COMMENTS > How this service is important for NPAC > Time frame: when it was enabled and how long is expected to run > What problems you experience with running the service > Any tricks to keep it alive ? > > If you would like to move the service to category "A", > forget about it and concentrate on some new projects, > the service must be correctly designed and described. > Access to configuration files and other componets > must be available to a limitted number of pople. > Such a service (but not contents) cannot be modified > without systems assistance if we want to run it in a stable > fashion. > > Anyway, please help systems in their efforts to support > NPAC activities and send to systems@npac.syr.edu the description > of servers and services you are running and currently maintain. > Your description will be formatted and put on internal web server. > I hope that it is not a one-time effort. New services will be > documented and old descriptions will be updated if necessary. > > I would like to achieve a kind of agreement. Systems will > support with high priority only services that have appropriate > description, available for them. > > thanks for your attention > roman > ********************************************************************** > * Roman Markowski, IS Manager * > * Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University * > * 111 College Place, Syracuse NY 13244-4100 * > * tel 315 443 3921 fax 315 443 1973 * > * email roman@npac.syr.edu * > ********************************************************************** ********************************************************************** * Roman Markowski, IS Manager * * Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University * * 111 College Place, Syracuse NY 13244-4100 * * tel 315 443 3921 fax 315 443 1973 * * email roman@npac.syr.edu * **********************************************************************