You came here because you were curious about an Experimental Service, and what that means in the Nikhef context. Welcome!
The CT-PDP teams at Nikhef run many services: highly important ones that support our primary mission. Highly available ones, where we monitor continuously what is going on and (at least attempt to) provide reasonably quick resolution in case of trouble. There is usually documentation. And of course there’s support for folk who use the services, on-demand or during the CT-PDP Office Hours.
Then there are Experimental Services. You get none of the above. None. They are vastly different and could do you more harm than good. They may cause you distress. They may cause you to loose years of valuable work. They may make your pet walk out on you. Who knows …
So you came here from an expertimental service run by the Nikhef Physics Data Processing group - and that one is subject to our customary-best-effort service level:
- if it’s broken, tell us … and we might even fix it.
- if it works: also tell us, so we may change it beyond recognition!
- … ‘if it breaks, you get to hold the pieces’.
We do not offer any service guarantee, neither expressed nor implied, about the suitability of experimental services for any purpose, in particular not for getting work done. The service is operated by the PDP group or one of its members as a playground, meaning that connection details, hostnames, login method, functionality, or data persistency may change. Any time.
If you now feel uncomfortable about the service you tried to access, please stop using it. If you don’t feel uncomfortable with experimental services, you’re in the right place. Enjoy them, like them, and feel welcome! Try it out and tell us what you think about it at experimental-services@nikhef.nl.