Hi Antonio,

On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 11:17, Antonio Retico wrote:

> well, actually the generic installation is a very technical and neutral
> document where no guidelines at all are given about which kind of
> service is mandatory, dangerous, delicate or "cool" to run. So to remove

You can intend the document to be neutral, but it is rarely perceived
that way.

> completely a supported installation method (that could be useful,
> incidentally, also to some big sites) does not appear to be a good idea
> and I am sure it is not what you mean.

I have been repeatedly told by the YAIM people that the target audience
is NOT large sites, but small sites.  Putting stuff into the YAIM
examples that "might be useful for large sites" is therefore a bad idea,
since it's mostly the small sites that will be looking at these
examples.

> What is probably missing is a "deployment strategy" document for small
> sites, that is something completely different. Provided that a site
> administrator knows which nodes he needs to install, it could then pick
> just the needed variables in site-info.def by according to the "context"
> information in the site configuration file specification.

I had a discussion with some people about this, not on ROLLOUT, perhaps
it's time to do it here.  Our experience in a previous project showed
that the best way to make such an example site config file was the
following:

1. the things that almost all sites would need were put in looking
exactly like they should, except that the hostnames were made "obviously
wrong", like "excellent-ce.changme.org" would be put in for CE_HOSTNAME.

2. the things that were not relevant for most sites were put in as well,
but COMMENTED OUT.  This would look like the following:

/* uncomment this line if you need to run a myproxy server */

/* PX_HOSTNAME=very-secure-machine.studly.net */

The theory here is that if there is a machine type which should not be
run unless "you know what you are doing", then the sysadmin should have
to actively change the file in order to turn on install/configure of
that type.  Basically there are going to be some people out there who
aren't quite sure what they are allowed to change.  So they won't change
things, and if a myproxy machine type is in the file, they won't change
that.

A good example is the number of sites that had "flatfiles" as the SE
area in the EDG project.  The data management tools supported only flat
files, so why did everyone call their storage area flatfiles?

Right.  Because that was what was in the example config files.

        J "try the command below" T

ldapsearch -h your-favorite-bdii-here -p 2170 -x -b
"mds-vo-name=local,o=grid" | grep cessp | sort | uniq -c   | sort -n