04 December 2007

dCache admin scripts

Last week I finally got a chance to have another look at some of the dCache administration scripts that are in the sysadmin wiki [1]. There is a jython interface to the dCache admin interface, but I find it difficult to use. As an alternative, the guys at IN2P3 have written a python module that creates a dCache admin door object which you can then use in your own python scripts to talk to the dCache [2]. One thing that I did was use the rc cleaner script [3] to clean up all of the requests (there were 100's!) that were stuck in Suspended state. You can see how the load on the machine running postgres dropped after removing the entries. Highly recommended.

I also wrote a little script to get information from the LoginBroker in order to print out how many doors are active in the dCache. This is essential information for sites that have many doors (i.e. Manchester) but find the dCache 2288 webpage difficult to use. I'll put it in the SVN repository soon.

[1] http://www.sysadmin.hep.ac.uk/wiki/DCache
[2] http://www.sysadmin.hep.ac.uk/wiki/DCache_python_interface
[3] http://www.sysadmin.hep.ac.uk/wiki/DCache_rc_cleaner

1 comment:

Brian Bockelman said...

Hey Greig,

If you want to start talking about dCache admin scripts, might want to look here:

http://t2.unl.edu:8092/browser/dCacheNebraska/scripts

The python scripts have no dependencies. The scripts/dCacheAdmin.py provides an interface to the dCache admin interface. Some documentation is here:

http://t2.unl.edu/documentation/dcachenebraska-scripts

(more for using the scripts, not programming in the framework). I also have a ReplicaManager replacement, here:

http://t2.unl.edu/documentation/dcache-pfm

A SRM-based "tape stager":

http://t2.unl.edu/documentation/dcache/srm-stager/

This pulls CMS files from the appropriate T1 if they happen to go missing.

I also have a few graphs based on the SRM transfer database which might be interesting:

http://t2.unl.edu/storage/transfers

In fact, I have a lot of stuff which might be useful to your local dCache folks... drop me a line sometime.