Doing VDT Support

This is a brain dump of how Alain does VDT support, and guidance for how others should help with it in his absence.

Monitoring vdt-support

It’s important to see the incoming tickets. Alain subscribes to vdt-support@opensciencegrid.org. This causes him to see lots of email, but it also means he gets quick notification of everything that will become a ticket. Also, it for some reason RT doesn’t make a ticket, Alain still sees it. Alain is also copied on all email that RT sends, though he forgets how it is set up. So he sees all new vdt-support tickets when they are created.

Other people can do this, or they can just load the RT page once a day to see what is happening.

Handling different tickets

• For spam, I delete the ticket. (Resolve->Deleted)
• For GOC announcements that affect the OSG-EDU site we run, I assign them to Scot if he is around, or I handle them if he isn’t. Most of them aren’t hard, and they are rare.
• For GOC announcements that require no action from us, I resolve them, and mark them as rejected. This is so when we calculate statistics on how many tickets we’ve gotten, these don’t look like real work. We get a lot of random announcements from the GOC.
• Tickets about dCache. Neha Sharma at Fermilab is responsible for them. If they originated as a GOC Footprints ticket, I tell her the ticket number in private email, then I respond to the GOC and tell them that Neha will take it in Footprints. For tickets sent directly to us, I tell Neha about them and she gets them into the GOC’s Footprints ticket handling system.
• John Weigand reports a lot of VOMS problems to us directly, and other people sometimes do. I see how much I can resolve, and often end up making a ticket in Savannah. Record the Savannah ticket URL in the RT ticket.
• Security problems: Make sure that Mine Altunay maltunay@fnal.gov and Jim Basney jbasney@ncsa.uiuc.edu know about them. I usually participate on a closed security discussion mailing list, osg-security-l, to discuss security problems. If I’m gone and someone else needs to join the list, ask Mine.
• Other tickets are dealt with on a case-by-case basis, assigning them to people as appropriate. If I’m gone, but a ticket really requires my attention, do what you can do. Tell the responder about me being gone. If it has to be dealt with before I return, do the best you can.

Tips and Advice

• Don’t hesitate to call people: It’s often the fastest way to resolve problems.
• If people have gotten enough of their VDT installation done that they have the vdt-system-profiler installed, have them run it. It requires VDT_LOCATION to be defined, so they have to do that if setup.sh doesn’t exist. It makes a vdt-profile.txt that is really useful for answering lots of questions about their installation.
• I often find that if I can get a login on someone’s computer, debugging goes much faster. You can’t always get one, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.