Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.4.0
November 15, 2019
We are happy to announce the ARC 6.4.0 release. This release includes the reimplementation of the ARC-CE accounting subsystem, we now also support Centos 8, and a few nice bugfixes have been made.
Highlights in this release
The ARC-CE accounting subsystem has been reimplemented. The central point of the next generation Accounting Subsystem is a local SQLite accounting database that stores all the A-Rex Accounting Record (AAR) information. AAR defines all accounting information stored about a single ARC CE job.
The new system improves scalability, eliminates bottlenecks of the legacy architecture and provides much more information about the ARC CE jobs on site. The publishing and republishing of the records also have been improved, in particular APEL has received support for summary and sync messages.
The switch to the new accounting is fully transparent except for one change in the benchmark values in the ARC configuration, see below. The documentation for the new accounting can be found here.
Some important accounting details:
- The benchmark values should now be configured per-queue [queue:name] instead of the [arex/jura/apel] block. The configuration validator will prevent A-REX to start if the values are specified in the old way (pre 6.4.0).
- The new system automatically provides archiving of all accounting records in the database, therefore the old way of record archiving via the JURA [arex/jura/archiving] is DEPRECATED.
- APEL publishing now sends summary records instead of individual records by default.
- The arcctl accounting provides a new set of commands for flexible analysis of local accounting data. Old archived records can also be analyzed or republished using arcctl accounting legacy commands.
The following Bugzilla tickets have been resolved
- 3884 Cleanup ARC SDK python bindings dependency for A-REX
- 3883 New accounting subsystem for ARC CE that uses local database
- 3882 Improve mass issuing of user certs in arcctl Test CA
- 3881 Client tools failed on CentOS 8 / OpenSSL 1.1.1
- 3880 logs created as root user when user= defined in [arex] block causes the service not to start
- 3878 Dependencies problems on CentOS8
- 3873 Occationally failing tests
- 3870 Segfault in arched
- 3860 UsedTotalWallTime and RequestedTotalWallTime
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:
- 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.
- Security fixes for ARC5 will be provided till end of June 2020.
- 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".
- 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