Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 15.03 update 13

April 6, 2017

This is a minor release, introducing new features and addressing bugs discovered since release 15.03u12.

As of Fedora 26 and Debian 9 and their migration to OpenSSL 1.1, ARC has undergone a lot of work in order to implement support for the new OpenSSL versions. The consequence is that

• support of OpenSSL versions lower than 1.0.0 is dropped.
• support for EL5 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and below is dropped.
• old GSI proxies are no longer supported. This should not cause complications as both WLCG and EGI have confirmed that they do not use non-RFC proxies. ARC uses RFC proxies by default.
• Canl C++ is no longer supported as it is retired from Fedora and Debian.

NorduGrid ARC 15.03 has received an update to:

• core, clients, CE, Infosys and gridftp - from version 5.2.2 to 5.3.0
• gangliarc - from 1.0.1 to 1.0.2
• documents - from 2.0.13 to 2.0.14

Nagios plugins and metapackages are unchanged.
CAnL C++ is removed

A new standalone tool, jura_to_es has been developed. This allows sending of Jura accounting logs to Elasticsearch for analysis.

New features highlights

• Support of OpenSSL 1.1.0 and above.
• Ganglia implementation in A-Rex. This allows ganglia job-metrics to be extracted directly from A-Rex, instead of from parsing log-files and other job-related files like the standalone gangliarc tool does. The two can run alongside each other. Enable the A-Rex ganglia implementation from the [grid-manager] block in your arc.conf file. Enter enable_ganglia="yes" and ganglialocation="/usr/bin", where the path should point to your specific installation. See also Wiki doc for details on how to use ganglia with ARC (gangliarc).
• New standalone tool which sends JURA accounting logs to Elasticsearch. Download source code from NorduGrid SVN and install with 'python setup.py install'. After installation start the tool with '/etc/init.d/jura_to_es start'. For details see the README file distributed with the tool.
• New option to allow all data transfer log messages to be collected in a central log (See bug 2598)

Detailed notes

ARC Server and core components

The following issues were fixed in the ARC core:

• Added new option to allow all data transfer log messages to be collected in a central log. Use the option central_logfile in the [data-staging] block to turn it on. All log-messages from the data-staging will then, in addition to be written to each jobs log.<jobid>.errors file, be tracked in the file datastaging.log in your ARC log directory. (Bug 2598).
• Improved stability of GridFTP DMC by handling unexpected callback in GridFTP related code. (Bug 3636).
• It is now possible through configuration through the max_jobs parameter in the [grid-manager] block to limit number of subproceses started by A-Rex hence avoiding exhaustion of OS resources - number of child processes allowed.
• Ensured compatability with new libs3 API.
• Optimised data staging option of gm-jobs - no need to parse control files.
• More support for sqlite as delegation database. To replace unstable BDB.
• Various smaller enhancements and bugfixes in addition to code cleaning.

Accounting

• No changes

Information system

The following issues were fixed in the information system:

• Removal of leftover code from old infoproviders, namely support for gridftp storage. ARC can no longer publish gridftp Storage Element information. (Bug 3286).
• Removal of heartbeat between A-REX and infoproviders. A consequence of these fixes is that A-REX should be more stable, but infoproviders might take more time. In particular:
  • The default infoproviders timeout is changed to 3 hours
  • The default bdii timeout is changed to 6 hours

ARC Clients

• No changes

Nagios plugins

• No changes

Common authentication library CaNL++

• This library has been removed as a consequence of supporting openssl >= 1.1.

Fixed bugs:

Since ARC 15.03 update 12, the following bugs were fully or partially fixed:

• 2036 infosys not scalable for ~100k jobs (related to bug 3573)
• 2598 data transfers should log error messages to a central log
• 3286 Phase out old infoproviders legacy code
• 3573 Remove heartbeat code and increase infoproviders and bdii default timeout (related to bug 2036)
• 3603 Updates in HTCondor 8.5.5 break job status query in the back-end
• 3635 nordugrid-arc: FTBFS with libs3-4.0-0.1.20170206git208bcba.fc26
• 3636 A-Rex hanging\/crashing in GridFTP DMC destructor
• 3638 Specify an exclusion pattern in preferredpattern
• 3641 SSL errors with CERN certificates
• 3644 Value of NordugridQueue attribute should be quotation marks

Known issues

• There is a memory leak when using Java API for multiple job submission with files to BES interface.
• The CPU time is not measured correctly for jobs that kill the parent process, such as some agent-based/pilot (e.g., ALICE)
• JURA will not publish records to the APEL on a standard Debian/Ubuntu system, because the python-dirq package is not available for them. The workaround is to build this package from source.
• When using ARC client tools to submit jobs to CREAM, only JSDL can be used to describe jobs, and the broker type must be set to Null in the client.conf file
• ARC GUI (arcjobtool) is not available yet, pending implementation of client library changes.
• Standalone client tar-balls for Linux are not yet available.
• Bug 2905 is solved using workaround. Source of problem is not yet identified.
• A-REX can under some circumstances lose connection with CEinfo.pl and go into an infinite loop. The only current workaround is to restart the a-rex service.
• twistd, the underlying engine for ACIX, sometimes logs into rotated ACIX log files. While all log messages are correctly logged in the main log file, some rotated log files may receive new log messages.
• submit-*-job do not have permission to write performance metrics to log.
• authorizedvo=<voname> will no longer create a list of VOs under each Share. As a consequence, EMIES WS clients can no longer find a queue by VO name the same way as in previous versions of ARC due to changes in the GLUE2 schema rendering.

Availability

Source

ARC release 15.03u13 consists of the following source packages:

• NorduGrid ARC, version 5.3.0 (main components)
• NorduGrid ARC Documents version 2.0.14
• metapackages for client tools, computing element and information index, version 1.0.7
• Nagios probes for ARC CE, version 1.8.4
• gangliarc - ARC Computing Element monitoring in ganglia, version 1.0.2
• jura_to_es - Jura logs to ElasticSearch, version 1.0.0

Source code for main components is available from:
http://svn.nordugrid.org/repos/nordugrid/arc1/tags/5.3.0

Documentation source (mostly LaTeX) is available from:
http://svn.nordugrid.org/repos/nordugrid/doc/tags/2.0.14

Source for metapackages is available from:
http://svn.nordugrid.org/repos/packaging/{fedora,debian}/nordugrid-arc-meta/tags/1.0.7

Source for Nagios probes is available from:
http://svn.nordugrid.org/repos/nordugrid/nagios/tags/release-1.8.4

Source for gangliarc is available from:
http://svn.nordugrid.org/repos/nordugrid/contrib/gangliarc/tags/1.0.2

Repositories

See detailed description at NorduGrid downloads

These repositories provide binary packages for:

• Debian: 7.0 and 8.0 (i386 and amd64)
• Fedora: from 12 to 25 (i386 and x86_64)
• CentOS: EL6 (i386 and x86_64) and EL7 (x86_64)
• Ubuntu: 11.10, 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04, 14.10, 15.04, 15.10, 16.04 and 16.10 (i386 and amd64)

Scientific Linux and RedHat are implicitly supported through corresponding CentOS repositories.

Previous releases

Details of previous releases can be found at the ARC Releases page