perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

["Andrew Lake" <>]

perfSONAR community,

Last fall we announced plans for a perfSONAR 3.5 release, targeted late September 2015, that focussed on the following:

  • Modernize the toolkit GUIs

  • Support for central host management and node auto-configuration

  • Support for Debian and other installation options

  • Support for low cost, 1Gbps nodes

We are please to announce that a release candidate of this revision is now available for beta testing. Do NOT install this release on your production hosts as it is not a final release and is intended for testing purposes only. We expect a final release sometime this fall.

For a complete list of features and changes in this release candidate, see https://www.perfsonar.net/release-notes/version-3-5-rc1/. A few highlights are:

- A preview of a re-designed web interface. Currently only the landing page is updated, with more changes to come in future release candidates.

- New auto configuration and central management features that extend the capabilities of the MeshConfig component and other tools. See the release notes for more information.

-  New bundles that allow you install all or a subset of the tools using a package manager like yum in addition to the traditional Toolkit ISO. See http://docs.perfsonar.net/3.5rc1/index.html#additional-installation-options.

- A preview of BWCTL2, the next generation of BWCTL. This is not used by default yet for regular testing as its still under heavy development, but is available for experimentation. See the release notes for details.

- NPAD is no longer installed by default for new deployments. It is still possible to install with yum, but must be done as a separate step. Existing installations will still have NPAD unless it is removed manually.

Those are just some of the changes, see the release notes for further information. Also keep in mind this is not the final release and we will be adding more as we get closer to the fall. Features NOT in this release candidate but to expect between now and the final release include:

- Expanding the new web interface

- 3.5 versions of the Debian packages

- More information regarding “inexpensive” nodes

- Better support for configuration management software like Puppet

- More bug fixes, documentation, etc

To install the current release candidate do one of the following:

- You may install a completely new Toolkit node by downloading and installing one of the ISO images here: http://downloads.perfsonar.net/toolkit/release_candidates/3.5rc1/

 - To update an existing system run the following:

    yum install Internet2-repo-staging

    yum clean all

    yum update

- To test an RPM installation using one of our bundles, install the Internet2-repo-statging RPM as detailed in the bullet above and follow the instructions here: http://docs.perfsonar.net/3.5rc1/index.html#additional-installation-options.

In order to help direct your testing, you may find a checklist here https://github.com/perfsonar/project/wiki/Toolkit-Testing-Checklist

As always if you have any questions please contact our mailing list. We appreciate you help in testing this release and look forward to your feedback.

Thank you,

The perfSONAR Team