perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

["Andrew Lake" <>]

Dear perfSONAR Community,

The final version of perfSONAR 3.5 is now available! Existing users may run "yum update" to get this new release. Alternatively, if you have automatic updates enabled, you should get the update within 24 hours. It is recommended, though not required, that you reboot the host after the update to ensure you are running the latest packages and kernel. For new Toolkit installs, you may find our ISOs at the following link:

http://downloads.perfsonar.net/toolkit/

For more information on install options, updating and using the software please see http://docs.perfsonar.net.

About 3.5:

Version 3.5 is intended to be an important first step toward increasing the usability, automation and ease of large-scale deployments for existing perfSONAR users. Read more here: https://www.internet2.edu/news/detail/8866/ Some specific changes in this release include the following:

- A brand new web interface that addresses many of the UI concerns voiced in the community over the past few years. You will be presented with this interface the next time you visit the toolkit after the update is applied. See the documentation for some screenshots of the new interface: http://docs.perfsonar.net/install_config_first_time.html#accessing-the-web-interface. 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/install_options.html in our 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/#managing-multiple-perfsonar-hostsfor more details.

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. Full release notes can be found at http://www.perfsonar.net/release-notes/version-3-5/

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 your feedback.

Thank you,

The perfSONAR Development Team