Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.4.1

December 2, 2019

This is an express release to repair two blocker bugs discovered in ARC.

• An improvement to the handling of xrootd in ARC 6.3.0 (Bugzilla ticket 3870) turned out to break xrootd transfers (see Bugzilla ticket 3890). As the reimplementation will take too long to properly test, we instead roll back to using the old xrootd implementation.
• Accounting: Since ARC 6.4.0 the accounting could not handle cases when a job was submitted by a proxy without a VO name. Protection against zero values are now in place.

In addition we have sneaked in a small fix related to PBS, allowing queue names to include a dot.

For information regarding all the changes in the regular 6.4.0 release, including the new accounting subsystem, please see the release notes.

The following Bugzilla tickets are resolved

• 3890 xrootd transfers don't work (Resolved temporarily by roll-back)
• 3889 Jobs submitted with proxy without VOMS AC extension can corrupt accounting database
• 3888 PBS queue with dots in their names

Documentation

The ARC 6 documentation has been rewritten in a modern format and is placed 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 (i386 and x86_64)
• CentOS EL6 (i386 and x86_64) and EL7/EL8 (x86_64)
• Ubuntu: (i386 and amd64, both LTS and interim releases)

In addition we build nightly packages for older platforms.

Future Support of ARC 5-series

Note that now that ARC 6 is released, we will only provide security updates of ARC 5.

In particular:

1. No new feature development is planned or going on for ARC5 and no bug-fixing development will happen on ARC5 code base in the future except for security issues.
2. Security fixes for ARC5 will be provided till end of June 2020.
3. Production Sites already running ARC 5 will be able to get deployment and configuration troubleshooting help via GGUS till end June 2021. This we call "operational site support".
4. ARC5 is available in EPEL7 and will stay there. EPEL8 will only contain ARC 6.

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

Previous releases

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