Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.14

December 2, 2021

We are happy to announce the release of ARC 6.14.0.

Highlights in this release

To increase the web interface security level, one can now configure TLS protocols and ciphers in arc.conf. The default values are in addition improved to strengthen security.

The new configuration options can be found in the [arex/ws] block. The options together with defaults (which will be used when not explicitly included in arc.conf) are:

tlsciphers=HIGH:!eNULL:!aNULL
tlsprotocols=TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3
tlscurve=secp521r1

Please check the documentation for more details.

Note that in ARC 7, the default values of the TLS settings will be tightened further.

Another highlight is an improvement of the process control which has been tested and reported to improve job processing and transfers considerably, especially noticeable at high load.

Finally, as usual, the release contains a handful of smaller bug fixes and other improvements.

The following Bugzilla tickets have been adressed or solved

• 4047 fork to vfork for process speedup
• 4042 TLS enhancements
• 4041 Torque event type
• 4040 Posix compliance fixes
• 4039 arcctl deploy igtf-ca debian package names
• 4038 arcctl datastaging bugs
• 4037 arc-arex-ws-start script bug

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 some older platforms.

Contributing

You can submit pull requests to our public repo which mirrors our GitLab repo.

The pull requests will be automatically copied over to our Gitlab repo where they will be merged into the source-code if accepted.

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

Support of ARC 5-series

ARC 5 is no longer supported.

To install ARC 6 from EPEL7 the package-names are of type: nordugrid-arc6-*

Known issues

• The arcctl deploy -e option is currently out of function due to an EGI server change.
• 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. Details can be found here. 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