VDT 1.3.8 has been moving slower than we hoped for, but it's coming along. We hope to have a test release early next week, with a final release one week later--in time for the OSG integration meeting at the end of the month.
Just last week, we got a new Globus patch that will be critical for GT4 PRIMA to work. It prevents Globus from using the gridmap file, even if PRIMA is in use. We also have new patches to fix quoting in Condor submission files, another patch to allow PRIMA to work, a patch to allow Globus's persistence directory to be somewhere other than a home directory (this will let us run Globus as the daemon user, and not require a globus user). VDT 1.3.8 Globus patches.
As people might know, we run Tomcat behind Apache, and Apache has had problems accepting new grid certificates. Nate Mueller from the VDT team worked hard, and has patched Apache to accept them.
We might have Globus running in Tomcat by the time this release is made, but we might not. We'll keep people updated on this.
Wiht Jens Voeckler's help, OSG environment variables from grid3-info.sh will now be propagated to jobs. This is true for all job managers: fork, Condor, LSF, and PBS.
VDT 1.3.8 will support x86-64 on RHEL3, and IA64 on SLES 9. OSG asked for x86-64 support, and it's finally here! To date, PRIMA doesn't work on this platform, and we don't know if we can fix the problems before 1.3.8 is released. The Privilege Project is busy with GT4 PRIMA and cannot work on it for a few weeks. IA64/SLES9 is to support a new VDT customer, TIGRE. VDT 1.3.8 might also contain limited support for AIX 5.2, as an early exploration of support for TeraGrid.
Rob asked about x86-64 support on SLES9. We'll try to make sure it works, but you should be able to use Pacman's --pretend-platform flag to have it work.
Some OSG customers are keen on having the latest CEMon available. At a high-level, this is an MDS replacement, but it is a web service and can output LDIF of Condor ClassAd formats. When we upgraded to a new version of CEMon, it caused conflicts with GUMS, that took considerable time to solve, but they appear to now be solved.
We've upgraded a bunch of software. New versions include MyProxy 3.2, MonaLisa 1.4.2, UberFTP 1.17, SRM Tester 1.1, Virtual Data System 1.4.2, VOMS Admin 1.2.2, Condor/Condor-G 6.7.13, CEMon 1.6.0, and Java 1.4.2_10.
John and Rob asked about MonaLisa. The installation still doesn't prompt the user, but there is now a message in the post-install/README file that lets people know that they need to re-run it to get the final configuration right. This is purposeful on our part: we don't want to interrupt the installation of software in the middle of running to ask people questions that are hard, like "What is your latitude and longitude?". We don't know about the state of the VOJobs and VOIO modules in MonaLisa. John will talk to Iosif about it.
Shaowen will contribute some more updates to the GIP before VDT 1.3.8 is released.