[Jlab-scicomp-briefs] Farm mandatory /farm_out, AL9.7 to 9.8 next Tuesday

[Laura Hild]

Happy Tuesday, everyone-

Next Tuesday, the 20th of October, is the third Tuesday of the month, and therefore the monthly IT maintenance day.  During the workday, we intend to make two changes to the Farm that may require your attention.


Batch system change affecting stdout/stderr
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The more likely of the two changes to require your attention is that sbatch will default to /farm_out for StdOut (#SBATCH -o, --output) and StdErr (-e, --error), and reject job submissions that specify other locations, such as /volatile and /work.  See https://jlab.servicenowservices.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0014785 for more information.


Operating system full minor version update
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The less likely of the two changes to require your attention is that unlike the regular monthly patches, next Tuesday's will cross a minor release, taking us from AlmaLinux 9.7 to AlmaLinux 9.8.  We do not expect the update to require you to take any action, but it is more likely with the minor-version update than with the regular patches.  A summary of changes can be found at

  https://wiki.almalinux.org/release-notes/9.8.html#changelog
 
and the upstream operating system vendor's general compatibility guide can be found at
 
  https://access.redhat.com/articles/rhel9-abi-compatibility
 

Please file a ServiceNow Incident at https://jlab.servicenowservices.com/scicomp with any questions or concerns about either change.  Thank you!
 
-Laura