Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Henry Nebrensky said:
> > As Jeremy mentioned briefly there has been a question about the
> > provision of local UIs at sites. Can people say what
> they're currently
> > doing?
>
> > Having missed the meeting, I don't understand the question!
I'm not sure it would have enlightened you that much! Basically it's a
question of what local users should expect to be able to do - at the
moment many are probably using lxplus, but there may be pressure to move
away from that as analysis ramps up. Since we no longer have a central
UI at RAL, and installing a UI on a laptop is problematic, it's assumed
that there will be a local UI of some kind, and I was trying to get a
view of what's out there at the moment. Once there's been some more time
for people to reply I'll make a summary.
> At Brunel, the UIs I know about are standalone machines that users SSH
> into, but then anyone can slap Linux on their machine and run YAIM...
In theory that's true, but it takes quite a bit of knowledge and also
some maintenance effort (e.g. keeping CAs and CRLs up to date!) so we
shouldn't be recommending that as a standard solution. Indeed for all
but the dedicated hacker it would probably be better to use the CERN AFS
UI than a private installation.
> Is the question about the provision of access to users, or
> about tracking
> and auditing UIs that (e.g.) might have flawed openSSL installations?
The former.
> > Are there any sites with no local UI?
>
> Possibly depends what you mean by "site" - pedantically our
> UIs are on the
> normal office network (i.e. Tier 3/4 as was), rather than part of the
> (Tier 2) Grid resources.
Well, the basic point is that you would normally need to have an account
on the UI and I'm assuming that most sites wouldn't want to routinely
give accounts to users from other sites, although I noticed that Mona
said that IC run an LT2 UI. So the question should really be, are there
any GridPP users who would not easily be able to get an account on a
local (-ish) UI?
Stephen
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