Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.20.1

July 5, 2024

This release replaces the accidentally incomplete release 6.20.0

Several important updates in this release. See below in highlights and Bugzilla tickets.

Highlights in this release

The most important changes in this release are the configurable support of APEL version (Bugzilla #4184), in addition to correcting an unintended side-effect of a fix to Bugzilla ticket #4143 where arcget for jobs submitted via HTTPS do not gransfer gmlog (Bugzilla #4161).

For the APEL related bugifx: the default is now v0.2 which is the current APEL format version, while v0.4 can be configured in arc.conf. The configuration is done in the "[arex/jura/apel]" block and the "apel_messages" option. If you do not set the apel_messages option, the default "summaries" value corresponding to v0.2 is used. If you want to use v0.4 use the "summaries-v04" instead.

Note that APEL does not yet support the v0.4 in their production instance.

The following Bugzilla tickets have been addressed or solved

• 4184 APEL v0.2 and v0.4 support
• 4168 "arcctl service restart -a" fails to start, with multiple 'cachedir' in '[arex/cache]'
• 4166 Misspelling of special targets in unit files
• 4167 Missing dependency ordering on nss-lookup.target for arc-infosys-ldap-slapd.service
• 4161 arcget and gmlog WARNING messages and job failure in ARC 6.19.0
• 4149 Escaping apostrophe in signing policy
• 4116 GLUE2 info system is inconsistent between ARC6 and ARC7 wrt to existing and published ForeignKeys

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

Coming ARC 7 release

Start getting ready for ARC 7. We expect a release after summer. You can already now install the testing version of ARC from the testing repository. For upgrade instructions, please see migration guide.

The support policy of ARC 6 will follow the same policy we had for ARC 5: 1 year security updates, no more development of ARC 6 once ARC 7 is out.

Installing from EPEL

Once the release is out, it can be installed from EPEL using package-name types: nordugrid-arc7-*

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.

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-*.

Known issues

• Related to the new accounting system introduced in release 6.4.0:
  Accounting records created by ARC 6.4.0 are affected by a bug causing missing benchmark values: see bug #3921. Recommendations are to update to a newer version of ARC. The bugreport 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