Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 6.9

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December 4, 2020


We are pleased to announce the release of ARC 6.9.0.

Highlights in this release

REST interface

In this release the main highlight is a technical preview of the REST interface. The specifications are detailed in ARC6 documentation.

Note that this is a new implementation replacing the earlier REST technical preview implementation.

The REST interface is enabled on the CE by the [arex/ws/jobs] block in arc.conf. To use this interface with ARC clients, install the nordugrid-arc-plugins-rest package.

We are keen for feedback to this interface, and expect a standard version to be ready in the new year.

arcctl datadelivery

Some changes and improvements have been done to the arcctl datastaging tool. Note that some options have now changed names, to hopefully better describe the function.

arc.conf

A new option has been added to the lrms block of arc.conf, namely movetool'= (Bugzilla 3239). This allows you to specify what move-tool AREX will use when moving files from the sessiondir to the scratchdir. This option is only relevant if you have scratchdir enabled. Read more in ARC6 admin reference.

New configuration validation tool

The configuration validation tool arc-config-check has been rewritten as an integral part of arcctl. This tool is not yet run automatically as part of A-REX start up, which is still using arc-config-check, but can be run manually with arcctl config verify.

We encourage people to try the new validation tool and report any issues through the usual channels. In a future ARC release the new tool will enforce validation during A-REX start up and arc-config-check will be deprecated and then removed.

The following Bugzilla tickets have been adressed or solved

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.

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:

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

Known issues

Previous releases

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

NorduGrid homepage