perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Andrew Lake <>]

All,

The second release candidate, perfSONAR 4.0 RC2, is now available for testing. As a reminder, this is NOT a final version and should NOT be put on production hosts. We are requesting that people help us test this version and will use feedback in preparation for the final release. This release primarily contains stability and bug fixes over RC1 but a few things to highlight:

- If you are updating from RC1, we highly recommend you run the command “pscheduler internal reset” and reboot the host. Note this command can take awhile depending on the number of tests on the schedule. We have seen this take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours on heavily loaded hosts, but generally it should be closer to the former.  While not strictly required it will give you a clean slate for testing to make sure your host is not suffering from any lingering bugs that existed between RC1 and RC2.

- The “psc” alias to the “pscheduler” command has been dropped. You now need to use the command “pscheduler” where you may have previously been using “psc” (e.g. “psc task ...” becomes “pscheduler task …”)

- There are still a few known issues. For a list of some important ones as well as a full list of changes see http://perfsonar.net/release-notes/version-4-0-rc2

In terms of getting the release please see http://docs.perfsonar.net/release_candidates/4.0rc2/install_rcs.html. If you are running RC1 it is quite likely you already have RC2 if you are doing auto-updates, otherwise a “yum update” should pull down the latest. 

Finally, a revised version of the previously shared release and support schedule for perfSONAR is included below. Obviously all of this is subject to change depending on how testing goes and when we actually make the final release. For example, we could decide to do an RC3 and push back the final release if we are not yet satisfied with the software in December. We will continue to remind people about this timeline and let you know if there are any revisions:

November 1, 2016 (today): 

    - perfSONAR 4.0 RC2 released 

    

December 2016: 

    - perfSONAR 4.0 final released

    

May 2017: 

    - perfSONAR 3.5.1 end-of-life

    - No longer providing new web100 builds

    - No longer providing NDT with perfSONAR

November 2017:

    - perfSONAR 4.1 released, will not be available for CentOS 6

    - BWCTL support dropped

May 2018: 

    - perfSONAR 4.0 end-of-life

    - CentOS 6 support officially dropped

Thank you all ahead of time for your help and please let us know through our user mailing list of issue tracker if you encounter any issues.

Thank you,

The perfSONAR Development Team