Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.7

July 2, 2020

Highlights in this release

This release comes with a handful of nice smaller enhancements and bugfixes.

Ubuntu deployment issues recently discovered are now fixed (Bugzilla #3933), and we have added the possibility of read-only caches (Bugzilla #3924).

The useful arcctl tool has been extended with datastaging information functionality. A first implementation is now released, and more additions are expected in coming releases. (Bugzilla #3906)

For ARC stability, several improvements have been made to avoid unexpected errors related to datadelivery causing ARC crashes. The crashes have only been seen in the emi-es interface. (Bugzilla #3925)

Note about Centos8 and openldap server

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.

We expect to provide a workaround for future releases.

The following Bugzilla tickets have been adressed or solved

• 3938 Implement the same definition of failed jobs as in gangliarc
• 3935 Request: Arcctl jobs kill/killall must actually kill jobs
• 3934 redirect stdout to stderr in script submit-condor-jobs
• 3933 arched-start incorrectly uses return instead of exit
• 3925 AREX crash
• 3924 Provide a read-only option for a cache
• 3923 Default infoprovider log level should be INFO
• 3922 job submission failed with sessiondir=*
• 3912 arcproxy -i should return non-zero exit code in case of error
• 3906 Addition to arcctl - make a summary of DTR information
• 3902 Job reported finished, but missing exit code and proper cpu and walltime
• 2058 support for the input staging jobs

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 (i386 and x86_64) - from Fedora 26 - no i386 support
• CentOS EL6 (i386 and x86_64) and EL7/EL8 (x86_64) - from EL7 no i386 support
• 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

Previous releases

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