perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Mark Feit <>]

(Sent to perfsonar-users since this is of general interest.  Nick’s question is about adding site-specific information to pScheduler tasks that can be grabbed and used downstream of the archiving process.)

 

Nick Mills writes:

…

The feedback from the network Team has been really good although there is a popular request to replace the IPs/hostnames with friendly aliases because noone can easily attribute locational meaning to either the IPS or the hostnames.

Is there any way to inject custom arguments to the tests so that they might be available as a custom addition in the archive output ? (Im using the http archive method)

…

or any custom fields in the http type archive json specification?

 

Yes, there absolutely is, and it works for all types of archiving.

 

pScheduler tasks can have a reference field that contains an arbitrary blob of JSON and can be used for anything you want.  On the command line, it’s added the same way as an archive (NB: unlike the archive switch, it can be used only once):

pscheduler task --archive @/some/file  --reference '{ …JSON… }' throughput --dest ps1.example.net

pscheduler task --archive @/some/file  --reference @/other/file throughput --dest ps1.example.net

 

pSConfig supports it, too:

 

"some-test" : {

             "_meta" : {  "display-name" : "Some Test"  },

             "reference": { "foo": "218apple", "bar": "ou812", "pie-factor": 3.14 },

             "group" : "whichever",

             "schedule" : "whenever",

             "archives": [ "wherever" ],

             "test" : "whatever"

          }

}

 

And, of course, as a plain JSON task specification, it’s an additional field called reference.

 

The reference data will appear in the JSON sent to the archive as .task.reference, e.g.:

 

{

  "task": {

    "test": {

      "type": "throughput",

      "spec": { "dest": "ps1.example.net", … },

      "reference": { "foo": "218apple", "bar": "ou812", "pie-factor": 3.14 },

      }

    },

    …

}

 

This isn’t required, but I strongly recommend putting site-specific data inside a uniquely-named object to avoid collisions with data added by other programs like pSConfig, e.g.:

 

"reference": {

  "otago.ac.nz": { "foo": "218apple", "baz”: "ou812", "pie-factor": 3.14 }

}

 

 

--Mark