perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Andrew Lake <>]

All,

The perfSONAR team would like to invite everyone to start testing the first release candidate of perfSONAR 4.0, the next major revision of perfSONAR. This is NOT a production release and DO NOT INSTALL THIS ON PRODUCTION HOSTS. At this point in time we are seeking testers with extra machines to help try the new software in preparation for a final release later this year. 

Major new changes features include:

- pScheduler: A completely new measurement scheduling system designed to replace BWCTL.

- New Graphs: New visualization of measurement data that leverage ESnet's React charting library.

- CentOS 7 support: We now have packages available for CentOS 7. We will also provide 4.0 packages for CentOS 6, so an immediate OS upgrade is not required at this time. A timeline of support for CentOS 6 will be provided in a separate message.

- MaDDash 2.0: MaDDash now supports alerts based on custom patterns thanks to work by the University of Michigan as a subproject of the PuNDIT project. It also has email notification, customizable color palettes and more.

- MeshConfig Admin GUI: A new web interface that allows you to define central meshes graphically. 

- Sunsetting of Web100 and NDT: This release does not install NDT or Web100 by default. Our support plan for these tools moving forward will be covered in a note being sent out shortly. 

Those are the highlights but see https://www.perfsonar.net/release-notes/version-4-0-rc1/ for more detailed release notes.

The best way to get the software depends on your operating system and installation method, so for details appropriate to your environment see: http://docs.perfsonar.net/release_candidates/4.0rc1/install_rcs.html.

In general, updates can be done through the OS package manager with no extra steps and you can do new installs with the OS of choice's minimum install equivalent, point at our repositories and install the perfsonar-toolkit package or one of our other bundles. 

Unfortunately at this time we do not yet have the NetInstall and FullInstall ISOs ready. We also do not yet have the Debian packages available. All should be available soon. In the meantime, you can install the packages on an existing CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 machines via yum.

Thank you ahead of time to all our testers. This is one of our larger releases in recent memory, and a lot more than can be covered in this email is included. We encourage everyone to take a look through the documentation at http://docs.perfsonar.net/release_candidates/4.0rc1, be on the look-out for further communication and to attend/watch the netcast of the perfSONAR talks at next week's Internet2 Tech Exchange (http://www.internet2.edu/news-events/events/technology-exchange/) conference for more details.

 

Thank you,

The perfSONAR Development Team