Minutes of the Data Management meeting 10 February 2004
=======================================================

Present : P. Charpentier, J. Closier, R, Graziani, A. Soroko, G. Kuznetsov, 
N. Brook, A. Tsaragerotsev, J. Saborido, I. Stokes-rees, C. Cioffi

Workload Management system
--------------------------
The distribution is ready and some scripts has been written to install the tar ball. 
Ian is testing the distribution and it should be available within two days. Some 
improvements are needed inparticular for bbftp. We should try to use GSI authentication 
to transfer the data. Andrei would like to use lbnts2 as a bbftp server and have our own 
Certification authority. It has been suggested totry to use the LCG one in first approch.
We should concentrate on two cases: we use LHCb ressources in a specific centre and we use
its own storage. The second case is to use run inside LCG and use the LCG Storage Element.
We should avoid to mix non LCG ressource with LCG storage.


Monitoring
----------
No progress since last week.


Accounting
----------
Some delay could be expected due to the fact that people involved has to face out a problem
of attack in the Spain centres.


LCG-2 status
------------
The software installation is ready but there was a problem of authorisation on LCG2 which 
has been solved this morning. So the Marseille people will do some test on LCG2 this week to 
report next week.


Alien File Catalog
------------------
NO progress because Andrei has problem to recover after the crash of the machine hosting the
Alien File Catalog.
Carmine ask a question about the XML file catalog. So the idea is to have an application which 
should provide a XML file catalog which could be use by Ganga or by the bookkeeping.


Production Manager Interface
-----------------------------
Gennady reports that in one week the implementation of the database interface should be available.


Production/workflow database
----------------------------
- All changes were implemented as agreed last week
- Python interface and database layout was distributed
- Python problem: xmlrpclib.ExpatParser
  cannot cope with large strings (Limit ~800 bytes)
  All is fine when using standard XMLParser from python.
  This solution however is slower.
  The reason why expat cannot deal with large strings 
  is unclear.
  In practice any application, which wants to receive 
  long messages must switch the expat parser off:

    import xmlrpclib
    xmlrpclib.ExpatParser = None


AOB
---
Andrei and Joel will prepare a questionnaire to be send to the Production manager in order to
know what will be available / used during DC04.