The HEP community may have significantly changed since my last
accelerator based research efforts (as part of collaborations).
If by "site-wide", you mean each individual collaborating group,
typically housed at different universities (or equivalent) around the
world, has its own sysadmin and hardware "management" team, that may be
in stark contrast. If you mean that a team located at a specific
accelerator or other "complex" -- Fermilab, CERN, etc -- remotely
controls the actual platform, environment, and associated
instrumentalities for a particular portion of an experiment within such
a collaboration, then no -- most university groups have their own
personnel, consisting of Faculty (research or "instructional"),
technical staff (including engineers in some cases), postdoctoral
fellows, graduate, and undergraduate students -- and, in a number of
nations, high school or equivalent as well as summer research students
to meet the societal goals (diversity, amongst others) of the national
funding agency (e.g., in the USA, National Science Foundation,
Department of Energy, etc) as well as to recruit promising
undergraduates from other institutions as PhD graduate students for the
local university research group. There is a consistency of platform,
environment, and instrumentality for data acquisition, and a consistency
of software applications for data analysis (to keep everything
consistent in terms of possible systematic errors).
On 5/4/21 1:42 PM, Mark Stodola wrote:
For our use, free is definitely a positive, but not a requirement.
We deploy our product's control systems and are really looking for the
long term stability and security patches. I wouldn't have a problem
with purchasing licenses, as long as it didn't get in the way. That
meaning, not having to deal with serial numbers, subscriptions, and
phoning home. I want something I can buy, deploy, and forget about with
regards to licensing. This is a logistics issue. I don't want to dump
that responsibility on our customer long term and not all of our
machines are remotely accessible to manage ongoing license maintenance.
This is likely in stark contrast to the HEP community, as I see that
more of a site-wide deployment managed by a team dedicated to the job.
Best Regards,
Mark
--
Mr. Mark V. Stodola
Control Systems Manager
National Electrostatics Corp.
P.O. Box 620310
Middleton, WI 53562-0310 USA
Phone: (608) 831-7600
Fax: (608) 831-9591
On 5/4/21 2:51 PM, James M. Pulver wrote:
Honestly, I've seen a lot of the FLOSS community prefer Rocky over
Alma, and I think it's because Rocky is actually not backed by any
company. However, we see how that went before, and I just think Rocky
as described is ripe for CENTOS 2.0 to me. It's even run by one of the
CENTOS founders, so -- maybe he's learned his lesson, but I don't see
that as a positivefor Rocky - it's neutral at best. I mean, CENTOS was
bought by Red Hat and then "killed". Oracle? not even a blip.
CloudLinux? Not a blip. Princeton, not a blip. I.e. all the rebuilds
with a organization behind them that isn't dependent totally on
community funding were basically unaffectedhere. The major distros
that are going strong are company backed (Including SuSE, Ubuntu,
RHEL, etc), except for Debian that seems to be the exception that
proves the rule to me. And most of what Yasha et al seem to belooking
for is a professional rebuild that is free - which might be a
contradiction in terms, except for communities maintaining what they
need for their use.
This is why I (and I guess Yasha etc) are so disappointed that all the
HEP labs can't get together to fund what? 5 FTE across all of them to
re-create SL for the HEP community? Or some sort of Internet2 license
that is affordable of RHEL (maybe that's the secret goal). Is that
really a huge part of the CERN, Fermilab, etc all the labs budget? I
imagine it's less than the commercial RHEL license costs. But we do
have Alma (and others, including Oracle - wish I trusted them even a
little) donating that rebuild to the world at large, so there's some
people interested in putting donations out there.
Anyway, digression aside, it's hard to do more than wait and see I
guess - and much of that waiting is maybe for EL9 and to see if Rocky
releases something that creates a better community than Alma has
managed. ThoughI'm still betting on a company backed project getting
going and keeping going much better in the short term anyway.
--
James Pulver
CLASSE Computer Group
Cornell University
________________________________________
From: owner-scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov
<owner-scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov> on behalf of Jack
Aboutboul <j...@almalinux.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 4, 2021 2:39 PM
To: Dave Dykstra
Cc: Bonnie King; Konstantin Olchanski; scientific-linux-users
Subject: Re: any update on CERN Linux and CentOS-8 situation?
Dave,
Thanks for your response. My message was going to everyone on the
list,not necessarily just the decision makers. To me/us it’s important
to involve the whole community not just any specific decision makers.
Thanks for your feedback. If you don’t mind, can you just give me more
insight/feedback as to why you think that Rocky is better positioned?
I’m curious to hear your opinion.
Thanks,
Jack
On May 4, 2021, at 11:30, Dave Dykstra <d...@fnal.gov> wrote:
Hi Jack,
I am not involved in the decision-making regarding Linux here at
Fermilab, so I'm just a community member as well. I think it's good
to have options but in my opinion the Rocky Linux effort is better
positioned for long term support by the community than AlmaLinux is.
Dave
On Mon, May 03, 2021 at 05:54:35PM -0400, Jack Aboutboul wrote:
Hi Bonnie, Dave, et. al.
I am a long time Fedora person and now the community manager of
AlmaLinux.
We certainly understand the quandary you are now in and we deeply
value the work that you and the scientific (both capital S and
lower-case) community do. It is of utmost importance to humanity.
Likewise, we can only begin to image the loop that the CentOS EOL
announcement must have caused you.
We are ready, willing and able to help. We released our x86_64
STABLEa drop over a month ago and are working on other architectures
now. We are also in the process of opening up our-next generation
build system, amongst other things.
I extend a hand to the Scientific community-at-large to work
togetherwith you all to build whatever it is that you need. We are
even open to offering a board seat (yes despite what FUD people try
and spread, we arecommunity-governed) to someone from fermilab/cern
(or some other representative) to ensure that the relevant voices
are heard and acted upon.
I'm reaching out to you out of my own volition, because I respect
youand the work you do and its vital impact in the humanity both
present and future.
Seriously, anything we can do for you guys, any way we can help in
order to promote and foster scientific research, we stand at the
fore readyto get it done.
I am sure there may be questions and I would be glad to answer
anything anyone would like to know more about.
Thanks
Jack
On May 3, 2021, at 07:25, Bonnie King <bonn...@fnal.gov> wrote:
Hi Konstantin,
There hasn't been any official statement. On the Fermilab side we
are holding discussions and gathering feedback from experiments and
other collaborators.
We are working on it and will make an announcement soon.
Bonnie King
________________________________________
From: owner-scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov
<owner-scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov> on behalf of
Konstantin Olchanski <olcha...@triumf.ca>
Sent: Saturday, May 1, 2021 9:27 AM
To: Dave Dykstra
Cc: scientific-linux-users
Subject: Re: any update on CERN Linux and CentOS-8 situation?
On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 09:35:02PM +0000, Dave Dykstra wrote:
Both Fermilab and CERN have stated that they plan to use CentOS 8
stream
for now (or Scientific Linux 7 or CentOS 7) and will evaluate later
whether or not to switch to one of the clones.
Interesting. I do not see any information about this and I believe
I receive both internal and external official communications from
CERN.
Do you know who and when made this "centos stream" statement?
K.O.
Dave
On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 10:35:18AM -0700, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
Any news or updates on the status of CERN Linux?
Per https://linux.web.cern.ch/centos8/ CERN users are strongly
encouraged
to use CentOS-8 while the same page states that support for
CentOS-8 will
end at the end of this year. Update is promised "during Q1 2021",
today
we are 1/3 into Q2 2021, and there is no new information.
The CentOS forums are graveyard quiet. (censored?)
Any information from the FermiLab side of things? Any information
from the SL side
of things? Any rumours?
I opened a support ticket with CERN about this, let's see what
they say.
--
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3,
Canada
--
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3,
Canada
