Note: This version of the VDT (1.5.1) 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 1.5.1 Release

On 8 November 2006, the VDT team announced the release of VDT 1.5.1.

Highlights

• On the path to providing full support for side-by-side VDT installs and updates, the VDT scripts that manage system-wide services (e.g., init.d scripts and cron jobs) changed:
  • Regardless of how installation questions are answered, no services are installed into system locations or started at installation time. Instead, answers are saved for when the VDT is actually started up (see next item). This new behavior is required for side-by-side installs: Newly installed services might conflict with existing services, and yet the existing services must continue to run until the new installation is completely ready.
  • There are new scripts to enable and disable services: vdt-startup and vdt-shutdown. Enabling a service means installing it into system locations (e.g., copying the init script from within the VDT to /etc/init.d) and starting the service (init.d services only). Disabling a service means stopping it (init.d services only) and removing it from system locations. Disabling a service does not mean removing it from the VDT — it can be re-enabled from the same installation. Note: The names and command-line arguments to these scripts will change in VDT 1.5.2.
  • All VDT scripts that manage services now use a common file to track service definitions and whether each service should be enabled at start-up.
• The Globus Toolkit was updated to version 4.0.3 (plus VDT patches).
• VOMS was updated to include the security fixes that previously had to be applied separately.
• We have updated the list of platforms we support. We no longer support RedHat 7 and RedHat 9. We now build software on more platforms, which will help compatibility.

Details follow.

New Features

Further details on new features in this release:

• The new service-management scripts, described above, change the way in which the VDT's services get started. In general, the new process is as follows:
  1. Install the VDT
  2. Source a setup script
  3. Read the post-install/README and do post-install steps listed there
  4. If needed, run configure scripts to complete post-install configuration
  5. Run vdt-startup to enable VDT services
  6. When needed, run vdt-shutdown to disable VDT services
• The Gratia reporting system was added in VDT 1.5.0 and updated in this release. Gratia is still under development and the VDT packages that install it have been tested only lightly. The goal is to start working with Gratia now in order to have a solid release ready for VDT 1.6.0 / OSG 0.6.0.

  To install Gratia now, install the following VDT packages (in the order listed):

  1. VDT (or VDT-Gatekeeper)
  2. Gratia-Reporting
  3. Gratia-Condor-Probe

  At this point, you should have a running Gratia reporting system that is monitoring Condor jobs.

  This release also includes Gratia probes for PBS and LSF. Install the Gratia-PBS-Probe or Gratia-LSF-Probe package as appropriate.

New Software

MySQL 5.0.27 was added to better support Gratia.

OSG-VO-Map was added. It provides two scripts: one named generate-vo-map, and one named check-vo-map. Both of these are optionally used by EDG-Make-Gridmap to create a good osg-user-vo-map.txt file. Check-vo-map is used by GUMS to verify that the osg-user-vo-map.txt file it creates is good. Further documentation is available in the package once you download it, but most of it should happen automatically.

Upgraded Software

• Fetch CRL 2.6.2
• Globus Toolkit, pre web-services 4.0.3
• Globus Toolkit, web-services 4.0.3
• GSI-Enabled OpenSSH 3.8
• Java SDK 1.4.2_12
• MyProxy 3.6
• Tcl 8.4.14
• TclGlobus 1.5.0
• UberFTP 1.22
• Virtual Data System 1.4.7
• VOMS 1.6.16.10
• Wget 1.10.2

In addition, packages were rebuilt using the new Globus build as needed.

Removed Software

We have removed the following packages from the VDT, because they appear to be unused by VDT users:

• ClassAds
• Netlogger
• Fault Tolerant Shell
• JobMon

Bug Fixes

• Fixed some minor problems with the new file-management scripts from VDT 1.5.0. Added substantial functional tests of the file-management scripts to our nightly test suite.

Known Problems

• MyProxy does not work on x86-64 Fedora Core 4 systems. We failed to bring forward some MyProxy build changes from VDT 1.3.11 and this causes the binaries to fail on this one system. This problem will be fixed in VDT 1.5.2.
• We have observed problems with jClarens throwing out-of-memory errors. At times, it appears that these errors interfere with other web applications running in Tomcat. The jClarens developer expects to give the VDT a new version of jClarens in time for VDT 1.5.2; it should resolve memory problems and some logging issues, too.

To learn more, you can view the main documentation page, documentation specific to VDT 1.5.1 or support tickets closed in VDT 1.5.1.

The VDT 1.5.1 cache is located at: http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/vdt_151_cache