perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Andrew Lake <>]

All, 

A new release candidate is available for the next major version of the perfSONAR Toolkit. This release has a major overhaul of several components, and we need your help to test these components. This version of the toolkit is still in the beta phase and SHOULD NOT be placed on production measurement hosts. Production hosts should continue to use 3.3.2. We are making 3.4rc2  available to those with spare hosts that they can use for testing with a goal of a final release in the coming months. 

This version contains many new features, notably a brand new Measurement Archive that provides huge performance gains on queries (especially for large data sets like owamp data), replaces the existing SOAP interface with a new REST interface and stores new data types (such as tcp retransmits for iperf3 and MTU for tracepath results). The new MA also keeps 5 min, 1 hour, and 1 day summary data by default allowing you to quickly view historical data. You will also notice new graphs that display some of these new data points where applicable and show latency, loss, and throughput on the same graphs for nodes running both types of tests. For a full list of features and changes see the release notes: http://psps.perfsonar.net/toolkit/releasenotes/pspt-3_4rc2.html

Currently 3.4rc2 is only available to NetInstall users of the toolkit. ISO images for fresh installs can be found here: http://software.internet2.edu/pSPT3.4rc2/

For users testing an upgrade from the 3.4rc1, you may run "yum update" and then reboot your host. 

For users testing an upgrade from the 3.3.x line, you can upgrade with the following steps:

1. Download http://software.internet2.edu/branches/release-3.4/rpms/el6/x86_64/RPMS.main/Internet2-repo-0.5-2.noarch.rpm (NOTE: this will work for both i386 and x86_64)

2. Run "yum localinstall Internet2-repo-0.5-2.noarch.rpm". This will point your server at the 3.4 testing repository

3. Run "yum clean all"

4. Run "yum update"

5. Reboot your host

These should be the only steps for upgraders. On upgraded hosts, a daemon will run in the background that will automatically move over your tests from the old MA to the new MA. Depending on the amount of data on your server this can range from a several second process to several hours, but eventually it should appear in the new graphs. You can monitor the progress of this script by looking in /var/log/perfsonar/psb_to_esmond.log.

It would be appreciated if all testers take a few moments to run through our testing checklist found here http://code.google.com/p/perfsonar-ps/wiki/PerformanceToolkitTestingChecklist.

Thanks ahead of time to everyone that is able to test. The more issues we found now, the better the final release will be so all help is greatly appreciated. Please email any questions or issues you find to . 

Thank you,

The perfSONAR Development Team