perfsonar development work

["Guilherme Fernandes" <>]

Hi all,

The new version of the package_maker script is now in the SVN. We have
changed a lot of things in order to make perfsonar more compliant to
Linux standards. Please rebuild your RPM packages using the latest
version (the dependencies and the package_maker script for DEB
packages have not been updated yet). For the moment, the brief
documentation Loukik mentioned will be the information in this email.
(We encourage you to read everything, but go to the end if you just
want to see what you need to do).

*What changed?*

- We now use /opt/perfsonar as the root directory for all perfsonar
related things. Tomcat will be available at /opt/perfsonar/tomcat.
Exist at /op/perfsonar/exist. And all the services will no be in
/opt/perfsonar/services.

- We won't be using version numbers in the directories (the package
management system takes care of version management) and *services
directory will be all lowercase* (this is done automatically by the
package_maker script, but absolute paths in configuration files need
to be aware of this).

- You can now also build RPMs using any user and in any directory you
want. Just have the package_maker.pl script and the webapps folder in
the same directory.

- The Tomcat RPM package installs a _perfsonar-tomcat_ script in
/etc/init.d for start, stop and restarting Tomcat. This script must be
run by root. We use JSVC to drop privileges and run Tomcat as the user
perfsonar.

- The perfsonar user is a daemon user now, which means you can't login
with it. The enviroment variables that are passed to the running
Tomcat process are the same that were available for the user starting
the script. The script tries to find JAVA_HOME automatically by
searching the following directories:

/usr/java/latest /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun
/usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-sun /usr/lib/jvm/java /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj

If you install Java using Sun's RPM, it will find it (and this is
still a dependency of perfsonar-tomcat package, so it should be
there). If you installed Java manually and in a different directory,
then edit the /etc/init.d/perfsonar-tomcat script and set it manually
(you can also add the path to that list).

- On the /opt/perfsonar/services tree, only the directories
WEB-INF/classess/perfsonar and WEB-INF/logs are writable by the user
perfsonar (which is the one that runs Tomcat effectively).

- Since we use JSVC now, logs for Tomcat can be found in
/opt/perfsonar/tomcat/logs/jsvc.err and
/opt/perfsonar/tomcat/logs/jsvc.log.

- There is now a question for the Architecture of the package being
built. For most services this will be the default of _noarch_. RRD-MA
for example compiles architecture specific libraries and will need to
set the Architecture accordingly.

- The Description for the service can now be given in multiple lines.


*What do the developers need to change/do?*

- You need to update all the absolute paths that were pointing to
/home/perfsonar/webapps/service-name[-version], so that they now point
to /opt/perfsonar/services/service-name-in-lowercase (and NO
version!). For most services this will mean changing log4j.properties,
service.properties and maybe default paths in the webadmin servlet
configuration.

- Make sure your service doesn't need to write to/create files
anywhere else than in the directory WEB-INF/classes/perfsonar. If you
have a requirement for this, let us know.

- Rebuild your packages using the new script.

The new Tomcat and eXist packages can be found at:

http://gijs.pythonic.nl/perfsonar/perfsonar-tomcat-6.0.16-3.i386.rpm
http://gijs.pythonic.nl/perfsonar/perfsonar-exist-1.1.1-1.noarch.rpm

Thanks a lot to Gijs for his work so we could do this as soon as possible.

Any questions or issues let me know.

Guilherme

2008/4/14, Loukik Kudarimoti 
<>:
> Dear all,
>
>  A couple of last minute tweaks..
>
>  1. RPMs - So far, we have been using /home/perfsonar (with a perfsonar user
> account) for installing all the packages.
>
>  We have been advised to change this approach (to /opt/perfsonar and with
> perfsonar as a daemon user). Thanks to Guilherme and Gijs, we hope to have
> an update package maker script (along with brief documentation) available by
> wednesday. This may of course have an impact on some values in your services
> (if you have hardcoded some locations to be /home/perfsonar for example).
>
>  We request that all developers check their email on wednesday and generate
> rpms using the new rpm maker script when its ready (until then, could you
> please hold off on creating new RCs other than the need to do these for bug
> fixes)
>
>
>  2. Web admin jar - the basic (i.e. wizard) servlet is missing AuthN
> configurations
>
>  The wizard/basic section of each service should have two properties to
> control Authentication checks (just like LS). Gina sent an email describing
> the text to be used for these two properties (along with textual description
> of authentication properties in the advanced servlet for
> service.properties). Can you please make sure that your service's wizard has
> the two required fields in the wizard? If you have any questions, please ask
> Michalis.
>
>  If you have any questions, please let me know. I will provide an update on
> our RPM progress tomorrow. Hopefully, if things go okay, you can all
> generate your RCs by thursday.
>
>  thanks,
>  Loukik.
>
>  --
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>  L o u k i k   K u d a r i m o t i
>
>      * *              Network Engineer
>    *     *            City House, 126 - 130, Hills Road
>   *                   Cambridge CB2 1PQ, United Kingdom
>   *                   WWW: http://www.dante.net
>  D  A  N  T  E          Tel:+44 1223 371300 Fax:+44 1223 371371
>
>