perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

["Andrew Lake" <>]

Dear perfSONAR Community,

This email is to make everyone aware that on Monday September 28th the final version of perfSONAR 3.5 will be made publicly available. Another announcement will be sent on that date with more details.

Many of you have automatic updates enabled and will get this release automatically when it is made available. After automatic updates run you will be presented with a new web interface the next time you visit your toolkit. Since the web interface is a highly visible component of the Toolkit, we don’t want to catch anyone unaware by this major change. If you would like to verify that automatic updates are enabled or you would like to disable automatic updates before this release please see our documentation at http://docs.perfsonar.net/manage_update.html#automatic-updates.

The changes with this release will include the following:

- A brand new web interface that addresses many of the UI concerns voiced in the community over the past few years including making testing results easier to find and providing more information about the host (especially to administrators). See the current release candidate documentation for some screenshots of the new interface: http://docs.perfsonar.net/3.5rc2/install_config_first_time.html#accessing-the-web-interface (Please note that this documentation will be on the main docs.perfsonar.net site after the final release). For this release you will also be able to visit the previous interface by navigating to http://hostaddress/toolkit-old in your web browser.

- Support for alternative installation methods to the Toolkit ISO on both CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu. This allows for more flexibility in deployment, especially for large deployments and/or those running lower cost hardware. See http://docs.perfsonar.net/3.5rc2/install_options.html in our release candidate documentation for more details.

- Enhanced central management and “auto-configuration” features to aid in the deployment of a large number of hosts. See our documentation at http://docs.perfsonar.net/3.5rc2/#managing-multiple-perfsonar-hosts for the preview of the new features in this area.

In addition to above there are of course the usual round of bug fixes and performance improvements that go hand-in-hand with a release. Thank you to all in the community who helped us to identify and solve those over the past few months. See our release candidate notes for what’s been included so far: http://www.perfsonar.net/release-notes/version-3-5-rc2/. Final release notes will be provided on the release date.

Also, please take this chance to review our hardware advice page: http://www.perfsonar.net/deploy/hardware-selection/hardware-advice/. Version 3.5 should NOT introduce any significant hardware resource requirements over version 3.4, but as test meshes continue to grow many of the requirements such as memory, are becoming “stricter” minimum requirements than in the past so this is a good opportunity to verify your setup. In particular, note that we recommend a minimum of 4GB of RAM for a perfSONAR Toolkit host.

As always, please let the perfSONAR team know if you have any questions and we look forward to sharing the final release with all of you on Septemeber 28th!

Thank you,

The perfSONAR Development Team