CERN Accelerating science

CERN RedHat 7.2.1 Certified

Jarek Polok and Jan Iven (Linux.Support@cern.ch)

CERN RedHat 7.2.1 (a customised version of RedHat 7.2) has been certified on May 15th. It contains a fair number of improvements over the last certified version (6.1.1), including a 2.4 kernel, OpenAFS-1.2.3, GNOME and KDE desktops and lots of updated packages (please note that Objectivity is not available for 7.2.1, and most likely will never be).

Please see http://cern.ch/linux/redhat7/ for more details, both for installation instructions and an overview of the certification process.

A big Thankyou goes to all the parties involved in this certification round.

Central Interactive and Batch Services on CERN RedHat7.2.1

Tim Smith

On June 18th the first LXPLUS and LXBATCH nodes running CERN RedHat7.2.1 were made available. These nodes have the standard LXPLUS environment built on top of the CERN certified RedHat7.2.1. The operational integration and testing of individual elements has been done, and the nodes have been opened up for full functionality testing by the users. This environment is therefore a release candidate for the production LXPLUS service, which should be refined based on user feedback during 2 weeks. On July 2nd a larger set of nodes will be installed with the resultant production CERN RedHat7.2.1 LXPLUS setup. These nodes are in addition to the standard CERN RedHat6.1.1 LXPLUS nodes which will be supported for some considerable time yet, and which remain the default pointed to by lxplus.cern.ch The nodes can be accessed via the alias lxplus7 e.g: 'ssh lxplus7'

The nodes already support a series of enhancements which will be propagated to the older service over time, such as LSF version 4.2 in a simple integrated cluster setup.

Additionally in the certified CERN RedHat7.2.1 many insecure protocols have been disabled for login (for example rsh or telnet), so access is currently only through ssh as well as X sessions.