CERN Accelerating science

Abstract

Concentrating resources on Linux, RISC services will start to be phased out in 2001.

After many years of successfully basing IT services on commercial RISC systems, the year 2000 has witnessed the full effect of the Linux take over. All major public and dedicated services now have Linux alternatives offered, and many non-login services have transferred wholly onto Linux, like the tape servers, disk servers and DNS subdomain servers. Our push in the year 2001 will be to streamline our services by concentrating efforts on IT's strategic platform for the coming years, namely Linux, with Solaris as an alternative. The first visible steps will take place with the turn of the new year 2001 when we terminate physics usage of RSPLUS, and restrict HPPLUS and DXPLUS to access by LEP collaborations only.

The Linux based LXPLUS and LXBATCH services already overshadow in power the AIX based RSPLUS and RSBATCH, and through the COCOTIME allocations we will be doubling their size over Christmas. Consequently (as discussed in CNL 237, December 1999) RSBATCH will be switched off over Christmas 2000 and for one year RSPLUS will be restricted to the engineering community who have a few applications which are known to be currently unavailable on Linux, before also being switched off at the end of 2001.

In order to achieve this the registration procedures for LXPLUS and the other services will be separated on November 27th. This will result in the multiplication of accounts reported by utilities like "phone" for any user of PLUS (instead of just PLUS, you will see PLUS, RSPLUS, DXPLUS and HPPLUS) for a short period, until the login restrictions are enforced at Christmas.

These actions form part of the RISC decommissioning schedule proposed by Manuel Delfino to FOCUS 17 (2nd March 2000) and detailed by Tim Smith in a memorandum to FOCUS 19 (12th October 2000) and to be discussed further in FOCUS 20 (7th December 2000).