perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Hunter Fuller <>]

Mark, thanks for writing that explanation.

At least for me, I never felt like it would be much of a contribution
because I have never made even a single change to any guide in
order to install the toolkit on RHEL, it just works. I guess I should
have mentioned that in my first email. We just use our normal RHEL 7
image, which does already have rhel-7-server-extras-rpms, etc. turned
on.
So, my kudos go out to the dev team for that. It sure does work well,
for something that's apparently unsupported (which I didn't even
really realize or at least process until I read this thread).



On Fri, Feb 7, 2020 at 11:15 AM Mark Feit <> wrote:
>
> Brownlee, Johnathan writes:
>
>
>
> I know, I know. Not supported. I get it.
>
>
>
> It doesn’t have to be that way.  perfSONAR doesn’t support RHEL because 
> none of the institutions doing the bulk of the development (ESnet, GÉANT, 
> Indiana University, Internet2 and the University of Michigan) run it there 
> and we haven’t been asked for it by a large-enough segment of the community 
> to put it on our already-full dance cards.  Similarly, nobody who’s running 
> it on RHEL has come to us and said, “we run this, it works and we’d like to 
> contribute what we’ve learned to the project.”
>
>
>
> This is one of those instances where a small amount of support from the 
> community would go a long way toward getting it done.  Specifically, we’d 
> need two things:
>
>
>
> First is expertise from an organization that runs a production deployment 
> of perfSONAR on RHEL to codify any differences in the installation and 
> operation procedures and continue to do so as RHEL evolves.  That 
> information will be folded into the documentation and the Ansible playbooks 
> currently in development.  Since the development team already does the 
> heavy lifting to make perfSONAR work under CentOS, I don’t imagine the 
> effort for RHEL would consume a lot of time, especially for a shop that’s 
> already doing what’s necessary to run it there.
>
>
>
> Second is machinery to participate in the project’s test bed.  This is 
> important because we need to make sure perfSONAR continues to run properly 
> on the distributions we support.  At a minimum, we’d need two VMs (4 cores, 
> 4 GiB of RAM, 20 GB of disk and an outside-facing NIC; gobs of bandwidth 
> not required) to run the staging release for betas; one runs continuously 
> and installs upgrades, the other is rebuilt from scratch nightly.  The 
> ideal would be eight, with two each for the production, staging, minor 
> development and patch development versions.  As we start to work on support 
> for CentOS 8, there will be a need for additional machines to make sure 
> what we do there runs properly on RHEL 8 as well.  There is a Vagrant 
> configuration in development that will deploy and operate a full or partial 
> set, so that end of it will become minimal work, too.
>
>
>
> If you (or anyone else) are interested in either or both, please drop the 
> development team a line ().
>
>
>
> --Mark
>
>
>
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