HTCondor workshop
Our Supercomputing resource "HTCondor" has had a very good start this
year and it has already exceeded the number of CPU hours used during the whole
first semester in 2013: IAC's researchers have enjoyed more than 330.000 hours
(37+ years) of computing time in just a little more than one and half month!
After the recent upgrade of our systems to Fedora-19, HTCondor has also experienced
some problems, for instance those related to the new firewalls, keyboard/mouse
recognition, etc. We are working to solve all issues and HTCondor will be soon
upgraded to its most recent stable version. A piece of good news is that this
new version will allow you to use the HTCondor checkpoint standalone mechanism
with the gfortran compiler in order to obtain fault-tolerant fortran applications:
you could create checkpoints when your application is running and then restart
it from any of these checkpoints (HTCondor is only needed to compile your application,
not to run it). We have also updated the
documentation
about HTCondor at IAC. To allow a more productive and efficient use of HTCondor,
we have organized a 3-hour workshop on Tuesday 25th (9.30 to 12.30). The workshop
right now is fully booked, but if you are interested in it please say so by
posting a reply to the
SIE's
forum post: we are willing to repeat it if demand is high enough. Remember
that you can always contact us if you are interested in HTCondor or any other
Supercomputing resources at IAC.
Real time sky brightness of OT and ORM, now on line
In summer 2012 the Support Astronomers Group (GAS) of the IAC installed
automatic Sky Quality Meter (SQM) devices at the OT and ORM observatories,
to obtain sky brightness measurements in (almost) real time. The software,
developed
ad hoc, makes a measure every 20 seconds and generates
updated brightness plots every 3 minutes.
A few weeks ago we helped the
GAS group to publish on line all these plots. There are daily brightness
data for each observatory, while the current night graph (measurement starts
and finish when the Sun is 10 degrees below the horizon) is updated every
ten minutes. You can see the graphs and get more information about the
SQM on the
IAC
telescopes website.
Software updates
The migration of the desktops from Fedora-17 to Fedora-19 is nearly completed,
with only a handful of PCs still to be updated. As for astronomical software
packages, several of them have been updated too, such as IDL to v8.3, Python
to v2.7.6 (including updates to many of the add-on modules), HEADAS to v6.15.1,
Sage to v6.1.1, astrometry.net to v0.46. We remind you that you can follow
our activity by visiting our
SIE
website (especially relevant are the
SIE
Activities and
SIE
Courses pages), or, if you prefer so, by following us on Twitter
(
https://twitter.com/SIEie_IAC).
Restricted access to Websitebaker sites as administrator/editor
Every website running on a Web server has the potential to let a malicious
attacker, using any of the numerous methods at his disposal, to compromise
the server. Our Apache logs show lots of attempts to exploit vulnerabilities
in our websites, especially those built with older versions of a CMS (for
instance Websitebaker). The sheer number of websites in our external web
server (vivaldi), some more than 5 years old, prevents us from doing a proper
upgrade for all of them. So, to reduce as much as possible the chances of
a successful attack, we are implementing a couple of measures:
- Administrative/edit access to Websitebaker sites is restricted
to the IAC network: this means that you can only login as editor/administrator
is you are in the IAC network. If for some you need to edit your website
from outside the IAC, drop us a line and we'll see how to enable it.
- We have installed in vivaldi the modsecurity
apache module, whose purpose it to recognize and thwart web exploits
and attacks. So far it's running in "Detection mode";
after some further tests on our development server, we plan to implement
soon the first rejection rules (it's quite a complex software, and it's
not easy to achieve the correct toughness while at the same time avoiding
false positives).
Network Connect from the command line
If you use the VPN to access IAC's internal resources, and are mostly interested
in the "Network Connect" tool, you might wish to be able to launch
it from the command line, without following the Web-based procedure. How
to achieve this is explained in
http://www.scc.kit.edu/scc/net/juniper-vpn/linux/.
When editing the configuration file, please set
realm to "Estandar",
and as
cafile put "/etc/pki/ca-trust/extracted/pem/tls-ca-bundle.pem" (this
is what worked in a Fedora-19 laptop). Then, launch the jnc application with
the
--nox flag. If you wish to use IDL with the IAC's floating license,
just set the variable LM_LICENSE_FILE as:
setenv LM_LICENSE_FILE "1700@zuko" (tcsh)
export LM_LICENSE_FILE="1700@zuko" (bash)