Cern week 3

I spent most of my time this week on writing the requirements for my Project. Was quite interesting talking to all the people and finding out what they liked and disliked about the old system. And how stuff works. It is quite hard to manage 5000 different machines with 80 different configurations. Then I did some math with x users, y computers and z services you have (x*y) + (x*z) accounts to manage. This is quite a lot is you image cern has 21000 users, 5000 computers and about 230 services. This means my system has to manage 106,150,000 user accounts. Further I started investigating what other HPC centers use. I read quite a lot on the net and wrote to some mailing lists. I further created a service so that every machines has a unique certificate (ssl) and this works over sindes. So the user logon can be encrypted (kerb5) and so can the transfer of the user data. I investigated into using a finished solution like Oscar. I spent quite some time looking into the structure already available especially the structure the Windows people use and if I could make some use of this.
I spent some time installing my 3 new development machines I got and configuring them. Further I got a new desktop what was really nice of my boss. Now I have 6 cores just for my desktop, what makes it blazing fast. And a joy to compile on. But this is not a real problem her as I have access to a 150 node distcc cluster. That's about it. Still got no flat. What is really worrying me. As I have to leave my flat in 2 weeks. But Juana is here and she is helping me to find something. More to come