Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 15.03 update 9

August 24, 2016

This is a bugfix release, addressing bugs discovered since release 15.03u8. The bugfix release also introduces two auxilliary tools a-rex-backtrace-collect and gm-delegations-converter, see detailed notes.

NorduGrid ARC 15.03 has received an update to:

• core, clients, CE, Infosys and gridftp - from version from version 5.1.2 to 5.1.3
• documents - from 2.0.8 to 2.0.9
• gangliarc - from 1.0.0 to 1.0.1

Nagios plugins, CAnL C++ and metapackages are unchanged.

Detailed notes

ARC Server and core components

The following issues were fixed in the ARC core:

• Fixed an issue where A-REX crashed after failed DTR
• Added support for managing services through the systemd system, as required by the newest Fedora.
• A tool was added to generate backtraces from core dumps generated by ARC.
  Usage: a-rex-backtrace-collect
  This will process core files collected in LOGS_DIR/arccore and produce backtraces for each of the core files. See man a-rex-backtrace-collect or sysadmin guide for more details.
  Please note that core files are now automatically enabled by the A-REX startup script by setting ulimit -c unlimited.
• There have been discovered several potential unstabilities in A-REX from the use of BDB for storing delegations and it is therefore recommended to use SQlite as delegations DB. To avoid the need to drain a cluster to be able to switch delegations DB, the tool gm-delegations-converter has been added.
  Usage: gm-delegations-converter
  This converts BDB database to SQLite database, overwriting the original database (meaning a backup of your original DB might be prudent). See man gm-delegations-converter or sysadmin guide for more details. SQLite can be enabled with delegationdb="sqlite" in [grid-manager].
• Various smaller enhancements and bugfixes.

Accounting

• No changes

Information system

The following issues were fixed in the information system:

• Added support for managing services through the systemd system, as required by the newest Fedora.

ARC Clients

• No changes

Nagios plugins

• No changes

Common authentication library CaNL++

No changes

gangliarc

• Added support for managing service through the systemd system, as required by the newest Fedora.

Fixed bugs:

Since ARC 15.03 update 8, the following bugs were fixed:

• 3427 a-rex crashes after failed DTR
• 3574 logrotate duplicate entry for /var/log/arc/perfdata/system.perflog from /etc/logrotate.d/nordugrid-arc-arex
• 3580 Failed to store delegation on multithreaded job submission
• 3578 Upload to S3 doesn't work with delivery service
• 3588 Missing conversion tool for switching to sqlite for delegation db

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.

Availability

Source

ARC release 15.03u9 consists of the following source packages:

• NorduGrid ARC, version 5.1.3 (main components)
• NorduGrid ARC Documents version 2.0.9
• 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 1.0.1
• Common authentication library caNl++, version 1.0.1

Source code for main components is available from:
http://svn.nordugrid.org/repos/nordugrid/arc1/tags/5.1.3

Documentation source (mostly LaTeX) is available from:
http://svn.nordugrid.org/repos/nordugrid/doc/tags/2.0.9

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 the common authentication library caNl++ is available from:
http://svn.nordugrid.org/repos/workarea/caNl++/tags/1.0.1

Source for gangliarc is available from::
http://svn.nordugrid.org/repos/nordugrid/contrib/gangliarc/tags/1.0.1

Repositories

See detailed description at NorduGrid downloads

These repositories provide binary packages for:

• Debian: 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 (i386 and amd64)
• Fedora: from 3 to 24 (i386 and x86_64)
• CentOS: EL4, EL5, EL6 (i386 and x86_64) and EL7 (x86_64)
• Ubuntu: 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04, 14.10, 15.04, 15.10 and 16.04 (i386 and amd64)

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