Policies for Using Online Directories and Accounts

Draft - for discussion - Draft

This note is intended to jump-start a discussion on how to organize online directories and how to use online accounts. Comments, suggestions and criticisms are welcome. Our hope is to come to general consensus and require developers to follow the guidelines fairly soon.

Elliott Wolin, Dave Lawrence, Mark Dalton

22-Nov-2013

Below we discuss suggested best practices concerning allocation of directories on the online file server, as well as guidelines for using the various accounts available on the online computer system. Our recommendations are based long-term on experience from CLAS, experience from the Hall D offline software effort, GlueX-doc-1892 developed as part of the 12GEV planning process concerning this topic, and discussions with Serguei P and others.

Goals

The single most important goal is to protect the production deployment software directories from accidental overwrite. And the worst case is not simply causing the system to hang or crash, rather it is to cause the system to appear to work but not work properly. Many days of data taking could in principle be lost if this happens.

Another important goal is to provide a suitable environment for developers, one that allows for simple, rapid development and testing of new code.

Finally, for those of us who will be on call, another goal is to minimize the number of calls we get at 3am.

Directory Stragegy

Account Strategy