Note: This version of the VDT (1.3.11) is no longer supported. Feel free to look through the documentation and install it, but we cannot guarantee support for it. The current stable release is 1.10.1.

VDT 1.3.11 Release

On August 2nd, 2006, the VDT team announced the release of VDT 1.3.11.

This release is intended as a mid-point between OSG 0.4.1 and OSG 0.6.0. That is, it contains some of what is needed for OSG 0.6.0, but not everything. It is being released now because some members of the OSG community would benefit from some of the features becoming available now.

Highlights

• VOMS and VOMS Admin were upgraded to fix problems encountered by OSG users. Also, they now use the HTTP service certificate to authenticate themselves.
• CEMon (the computing element monitor from gLite) was upgraded to fix several problems; it is now ready for experimentation in OSG. Also, the Generic Information Provider (GIP) is used to populate CEMon with information.
• Fedora Core 4 on x86-64 is now supported. (Requested by LIGO)
• The Globus Toolkit was upgraded to version 4.0.2 and many patches were added to move toward a common Globus build for OSG and TeraGrid. Notable changes are:
  • Pre-web services Globus adds the Scheduler Event Generator (SEG), which can improve performance significantly. It's not enabled by default, to reduce the complexity of upgrading. If want to use it, contact the VDT team for details.
  • Globus RLS now runs on 64-bit platforms.
  • Globus is built using the debug flavor (as before), and now packages like MyProxy and UberFTP are built using the debug flavor to avoid an assembly-language bug in the Globus OpenSSL library on 64-bit Fedora Core 4. This may cause slight performance degradation, but none has been documented so far. More information is available in the VDT ticket system: 1952 1931
• Fetch CRL and EDG Make Gridmap were upgraded. Note that these now run as cron jobs, not as daemons as before.
• Squid and Wget were added.
• The NMI Build and Test software was added.

Details follow.

New Supported Platforms

• Fedora Core 4 on x86-64 is now supported. However, we do not support 32-bit installations on this platform.

New Software

• Added the SRM V1 and V2 Clients. The V1 client was previously in the OSG software cache, and is now part of the VDT. The packages for these are named SRM-V1-Client and SRM-V2-Client.
• Squid is now part of the VDT.
• Wget has been added. OSG asked for it because they would like be able to ensure that it is installed on all worker nodes--in some cases it is not pre-installed.
• The NMI Build and Test software is now included in the VDT.

Upgraded Software

• Condor/Condor-G 6.7.20
• DRM 1.2.12
• EDG Make Gridmap 2.6.1
• Globus Toolkit, pre web-services 4.0.2
• Globus Toolkit, web-services 4.0.2
• GSI-Enabled OpenSSH 3.7
• Java SDK 1.4.2_11
• MonALISA 1.5.4
• MyProxy 3.5
• MySQL 4.1.19
• PPDG Cert Scripts 1.8.1
• PRIMA Authorization Module For GT4 Web Services 0.1.1
• SRM Tester 1.2
• UberFTP 1.19
• Virtual Data System 1.4.6
• VOMS 1.6.16-7
• VOMS Admin (client 1.2.13, interface 1.0.3, server 1.2.15) 1.2.15-0

Bug Fixes

• Numerous bug fixes and tweaks have been made to the Globus web services configuration. Many thanks to John Weigand for finding bugs and testing fixes.
• Fixed many bugs in the script that configures VOMS and VOMS Admin.
• Fixed some small problems with installing services into xinetd.
• Fixed some typos in our documentation.

Other Changes

• The Globus container will now put most of it's output into $GLOBUS_LOCATION/var/container-real.log instead of container.log. (The exception is information about the container starting up, and that's still in container.log.) This is because container.log is rotated each time the container starts up. We have proposed a change to Globus to allow the log to be appended to, rather than rotated, so some future version of the VDT will only have the container.log again. More Information
• RLS now uses unixODBC instead of iODBC. You shouldn't notice any difference, but it is significantly more reliable in our testing.
• configure_gip only uses osg-attributes.conf and not MonaLISA's configuration.
• When the VDT installs MySQL, it does not set a root MySQL password. We recommend setting a MySQL password for root, which you can do using configure_mysql; this is not a new feature. What is new is that other VDT configure scripts that create users or databases will now detect if a root MySQL password is set and, if so, prompt for it. Currently, we do not save the root MySQL password to disk (outside of MySQL itself) for security reasons. If you think it would be valuable and an acceptable security risk to save the password to a root-owned file, thereby avoiding subsequent prompts, let us know.
• Switched back to using the HTTP service certificate for VOMS. We had been using a copy of the host certificate for the last few VDT releases, but this caused some security and administrative concerns.
• We now ship the same version of GPT that we build Globus with. Previously it was a similar, but older version.
• The Globus-Condor-Setup package now requires the Condor package. Don't worry, the Condor package doesn't install Condor if you have properly set VDTSETUP_CONDOR_LOCATION, it merely ensures that the environment is properly set up. This change means that people that do not have Condor installed will get it when they install Globus-Condor-Setup.
• The configure_monalisa script now takes a new option, --ganglia-used. This was donated by John Weigand/Open Science Grid.
• Components (such as VOMS) that rely on using a particular certificate (such as the host or HTTP service certificate) now perform better checks for the existence and validity of the certificate(s).

Known Problems

• The CEMon Server, while available for all platforms, is not tested on all platforms. This is because the CEMon Client has not been built on all platforms.
• In our testing of Condor-G with the Globus pre-web services fork jobmanager, a simple job ('echo "Hello"') occasionally failed to return any bytes for standard out. Other tests of Condor-G passed all the time. Making the fork job take longer by wrapping the echo command in a shell script with a sleep(30) before and after made the problem go away. We are still investigating the root cause of this problem, which occurred only on some machines and only on some tests.
• We are unable to support 32-bit installations of the VDT on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 running on Itanium processors. We advise our users to use the 64-bit version. We will investigate the problem further for the next release.

To learn more, you can view the main documentation page, documentation specific to VDT 1.3.11 or support tickets closed in VDT 1.3.11.

The VDT 1.3.11 cache is located at: http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/vdt_1311_cache