Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.8.1
October 8, 2020
This is an express release which targets purely the arc.conf changes related to the deprecated arc.conf values in ARC 6.8.0 .
In ARC 6.8.0 the ARC validator would prevent ARC from starting up if any of the deprecated blocks and options were present in arc.conf. From 6.8.1 ARC will start even with the deprecated options in place. Note however that they are still deprecated and should be removed. The options will have no effect to your running instance of ARC, thus of no value.
The deprecated arc.conf values in ARC 6.8.0 are:
- In the [arex/jura] block:
- urdelivery_keepfailed (in [arex/jura] block)
- In the [arex/jura/sgas:targetname] block:
- legacy_fallback
- In the [arex/jura/apel:targetname] block:
- use_ssl
- benchmark_type
- benchmark_value
- benchmark_description
- legacy_fallback
- [arex/jura/archiving] block (the whole block is deprecated)
- archivedir
- logfile
- archivettl
For all the other changes included in 6.8.0, please refer to the release notes.
Important note on xrootd version for sites using the nordugrid-arc-plugins-xrootd package
For sites who install the nordugrid-arc-plugins-xrootd package note that ARC 6.8.1 is built with xrootd 5. On the date of the release xrootd 5 has not yet reached EPEL-stable, which means that to install(update) ARC 6.8.1 on RHEL-systems, you must enable the epel-testing repo: yum install(update) "nordugrid-arc*" --enablerepo=epel-testing or alternatively install xrootd 5 before updating ARC.
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
Known issues
- For sites with nordugrid-plugins-xrootd installed, epel-testing repo must be enabled, otherwise update will fail. This is because at the time of the 6.8.0 release the xrootd 5 had not yet reached epel-stable, and ARC is built with xrootd 5.
- 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: Bug 3921, Comment 3 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