Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.11

April 22, 2021

We are happy to announce the release of ARC 6.11.0

Highlights in this release

This is a release mainly to push out a handful of smaller improvements and bug fixes.

There is however one longstanding "feature" which has been improved in this release. Namely, the queue selection when there is no queue infomation from the client side.

From now on, if no queue is requested/selected from the client side, only queues configured in arc.conf will be among the possible queues to use.

This will avoid the surprising feature that the queue selection in this case is up to the batch system, and not ARC for such clients. This is not an issue when the ARC client is used.

Note that this means that from now you must ensure that the authgroups you wish to allow submission from, are authorized in the queue you intend the authgroup to submit to. Otherwise the submission will be rejected.

For details, please see the documentation on the subject.

The following Bugzilla tickets have been adressed or solved

• 4006 Select first matching queue from arc.conf when none is specified in job description
• 4002 Error parsing IPv4 address in EPSV response
• 3995 diag file not found
• 3994 Jobs don't move scratch files (OpenPBS-20.0)
• 3928 Wrong memory request for PBS back-end

Documentation

The ARC 6 documentation can be found at this location.

If you miss something or have questions, please contact us!

Installing ARC 6

We recommend to install ARC release using the Nordugrid repository.

• Start with the basics
• Get production ready

Note that if you instead install from EPEL for RHEL7 compatible systems, the ARC 6 packages can be found as nordugrid-arc6-* and not nordugrid-arc-*. This was needed in order to supply both ARC 5 already available for RHEL7 and the new ARC 6.

We provide binary builds for all supported versions of:

• Debian (i386 and amd64)
• Fedora (x86_64)
• CentOS/RHEL (x86_64)
• Ubuntu: (i386 and amd64, both LTS and interim releases) - from Ubuntu 20.04 no i386 support

In addition we build nightly packages for older platforms.

Future Support of ARC 5-series

As of June 2020 no more security updates are provided to ARC 5. Also since the release of ARC 6 in June 2019, no more development on the ARC 5 code base has been provided.

Production Sites already running ARC 5 will still get operational site support in form of deployment and configuration troubleshooting help via GGUS until end June 2021. However, we may recommend upgrading to ARC 6 depending on the issues the site is facing.

ARC5 is available in EPEL7 and will stay there. EPEL8 will only contain ARC 6. To install ARC 6 from EPEL7 the package-names are of type: nordugrid-arc6-*

Getting in touch

If you need help with the configuration file or have any other questions related to ARC 6, please contact us via

• Email: (Subscribe)
• Skype channel dedicated to ARC 6 support

Known issues

• In Centos8 the openldap server is not installable because slapd is not available in the RHEL8 release (Bugzilla 3944). As a consequence, the LDAP-based server-side information system interface of the ARC-CE will not be available either. If interaction with the ARC-CE relies on LDAP-based information schemas (glue1.3 or nordugrid schema), then we recommend that you stay with Centos7 for the time being.
• Related to the new accounting system introduded in release 6.4.0:
  • Accounting records created by ARC 6.4.0 are affected by a bug causing missing benchmark values: Bug 3921, Comment 3 Recommendations are to update to a newer version of ARC. The bug report gives instructions on how to manually fix the wrong benchmark values.

Previous releases

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