This is an obvious thing to do if you have a central GGUS that is
supposed to be the only helpdesk in the world. This isn't the case. The
EGEE model is (for all/most other countries) that GGUS is a switch that
passes tickets on to ROCs who then handle them. It is one of the few
things that EGEE currently asks a ROC to do and we failed. Actually the
automated handling of COD tickets automatically to pass tickets on to
sites was originally developed by the UK with the COD. This stopped
working when the mapping between GGUS and Footprints broke. It needs
fixing. 

GGUS may implement something to let the user select a site but they may
not have enough spare effort to fix things for the UK. 

It is one thing for an expert like you Graham to say the fault is with
the site but do sites want thousands of users deciding 'my job failed,
it ran at Glasgow, the fault is obviously Glasgow's, assign the ticket
to them'? The TPM is supposed to introduce this quality. If they are
failing it is worth raising this at EGEE08 this week.

John  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes 
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Graeme Stewart
> Sent: 20 September 2008 21:09
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Warning: gLite update broken
> 
> On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 12:58 AM, Coles, J (Jeremy) 
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Hi Ewan/All
> >
> >> There seems to be a bit of a black hole / backlog at the 
> ROC, last  I 
> >> heard no-one in the UK was getting assigned anything.
> >
> > I looked into this yesterday and there was a problem affecting the 
> > last few weeks but recently assignments have been made 
> reasonably quickly.
> > New helpdesk staff were waiting for GGUS access but have 
> been trained.
> >
> > Looking though GGUS at the moment I do not find unassigned tickets. 
> > The one for Santanu was assigned to the UK ROC at 
> 2008-09-19 17:26 (by 
> > Steve
> > T) and Santanu was then "involved" (not sure why it is not 
> "assigned") 
> > by the ROC at 21:44. Steve was involved because the TPM 
> assigned it to 
> > ROC-CERN at 08:55 (4 minutes after it was created). So in this 
> > particular case I think the hold up was the incorrect TPM 
> assignment 
> > not the UK ROC.
> 
> It's still a really dreadful system when such an obvious problem takes
> 13 hours to reach the site concerned. A mistake was made in 
> this case, but the real mistake in this case is in the 
> workflow of the system which requires a non-expert TPM to 
> manually assign a ticket when the submitter knew exactly 
> where the problem was and who should receive the ticket.
> 
> I just had to take Cambridge offline and assign them ticket 
> 41133 myself because, again, nothing would have happened to 
> let them know they were broken before Monday morning.
> 
> >
> > If you do notice tickets not getting assigned or being 
> assigned after 
> > an unacceptable period please let me know so I can 
> check/chase. As a 
> > way to speed up ticket distribution we are asking the GOCDB 
> advisory 
> > group and GGUS to consider using a helpdesk field in the GOCDB to 
> > populate a ticket submission drop-down menu.
> 
> As has been said on the dteam list this is so obviously the 
> correct thing to do I am stunned it even needs to be 
> considered. Introduce it, populate it initially with the site 
> address and then inform sites they can change it.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Graeme
> 
> --
> Dr Graeme Stewart http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/~graeme/
> Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, Scotland
>