Brett Viren wrote on 2/25/20 8:15 AM:
> "Peter Willis" <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>
>> Perhaps, if it’s not too much trouble, people on the list might give a short blurb about
>> how they use it and why.
Not quite a short blurb, but not too long either.
I am retired now (nearly 4 years) after nearly 50 years in the IT biz - 44 of
those at UIUC and 20 of those as an IT Admin for our local HEP group, and I can
tell you that there are two people who made my life immeasurably better. So I
just want to toot their horn.
Troy Dawson and Connie Sieh of FermiLab. Here's a great interview with Troy
that will answer a lot of questions as well as elucidate why we went with SL.
(I suspect the following will get transmogrified by Fermi's Proof Point URL
secret encoder ring)
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__old.montanalinux.org_interview-2Dtroy-2Ddawson-2Dscientific-2Dlinux-2Djune2011.html&d=DwIDaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=p76IJCxmwsNBSv-yK1gjd90aDixiH0QGmAOt17f6Gf0&s=_1X0fjomFwROuoTUSK43cCqxlIRTvLj6oFiyBnixFAE&e=
Alas, much to my initial dismay, Troy announced in 2011 he was going to work for
RedHat, but Pat Riehecky jumped in to those big shoes (Thanks Pat!). I would be
remiss if I didn't also mention Urs Beyerle and his work on the SL Live
CDs/DVDs. And, of course, the (then) smallish but amazingly helpful SL user
community on this list.
After infuriatingly frustrating and hapless encounters with RHEL support on even
the simplest of issues, being able to have one-on-one interactions with Troy,
Connie, and Urs (and other users on the list) was like stepping out of a cold
dark cave onto a warm sun drenched beach. [not hyperbole]
Our journey (in case you're interested and still reading) went something like:
Late 90's and early 2000's - SunOS (expensive hardware, expensive maintenance
contracts, expensive licensing). Start playing with this new toy Redhat 2.0.
(spare desktop hardware, almost free software, no licensing). Then Redhat 3,
then 4 - now seeing that we can replicate all services from SunOS to RH.
No longer a toy. Then RH 5 and 6, 7. 8, 9 and End-of-Life. LHC was ramping up
and about to spew petabytes of ATLAS experiment data. Time to start building
racks of storage farms and compute clusters. Switch to RHEL. But with that
came confusing and frustrating licensing plus the aforementioned support snafus.
Then an epiphany - one of our engineers was collaborating with another
institution on loading linux onto embedded processors as part of the Dark Energy
Survey telescope and came to me for linux advice. They were using a free linux
installation from CERN called Scientific Linux (SLC). "Really!" He said
FermiLab had a similar version (SLF) but that they chose SLC for whatever
reason. He said it's the same as RHEL. "Really!" (again) I found FermiLab's
website for SLF and the rest, they say, is history!
We started with RHEL3, moved to SL4, then SL5 (my favorite) and wound up at SL6.
SL7 was out and the HEP community was transitioning to it when I retired so I
didn't have to deal with it. :-)
Anyways, now back to retirement.
- Larry
--
P. Larry Nelson (217-693-7418) | IT Administrator Emeritus
810 Ventura Rd. | High Energy Physics Group
Champaign, IL 61820 | Physics Dept., Univ. of Ill.
MailTo: [log in to unmask] | https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__hep.physics.illinois.edu_home_lnelson_&d=DwIDaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=p76IJCxmwsNBSv-yK1gjd90aDixiH0QGmAOt17f6Gf0&s=62eHV163Nb89LsMLRPjQOEzjYv_oEs-6HtKt99PM2jA&e=
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"Information without accountability is just noise." - P.L. Nelson
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