12 March 02 Setup Package Meeting Results

Introduction

The purpose of this meeting was to discuss the content of GPT setup packages as well as software configuration in general. The list of attendees was as follows:
Attendee Organization Interest
Charles Bacon ANL Globus Administration, NMI
Scott Gose ANL Globus Installation, NMI
Eric Blau ANL GPT Developer Alumni
Erik Paulson UW Condor-G Packaging, NMI
Nadya Williams SDSC Grid Configuration Tool, NMI
Jim Basney NCSA Grid-in-a-Box
Doru Marcusiou NCSA Alliance, NASA Grid Installations
John Quinn NCSA Grid Performance Testing
Chase Phillips NCSA gsi-openssh Packaging, GPT Developer
Joe Greenseid NCSA Grid Installation, Testing and Administration
Michael Bletzinger NCSA GPT Developer, NMI

NMI Setup Requirements

For the first part of our discussion, we examined the configuration requirements for several NMI R1 components. The discussion is summarized in this table.
Question Condor-G Globus GRAM Globus GridFTP Globus MDS GSI-Openssh 1
What are host machine specific localizations needed? Email of the installer,
Logging Flag,
Debugging Levels,
, Install path		 Hostname, Subject Name of Host Certificate,
4 Architecture Items,
Types of Job Schedulers,
Logging Flag and File Location,
Debugging Flag		 Third party file access,
Logging Contents,
List of Transfer		 Install Locations,
Hostname,
Flavor Name		 Install Locations,
Host key generation,
Random Data Source,
Previous ssh installations
What are the organization specific localizations needed GSI CA Packages GSI CA Package GSI CA Packages,
Additional Mapping of transport files to directories		 GSI CA Packages (Special LDAP certificate),
List of registered GIIS's,
DNS of GRIS,
Schema for the information providers		 None
Is there anything that prevents the software from being shared by several machines? A lockfile is used. The host certificates are in a subdirectory of the host keys.
jobmanager.conf contains the host subject name.
gatekeeper.conf contains the logging location		 The host keys/certificates Most of the configuration files contain hostnames and install locations. No
Does the software run services. CondorMaster runs under certain configurations. gatekeeper wu-ftpd slapd sshd
Reserve Ports? 9619 2119 2811 2135 22
Special Issues? User Certificate needs to be present before installation. Multiple configurations can be deployed on the same machine.
A GridMap file needs to be present.		 Gridmap file needs to be present.
Shares configuration files with system ftp.		 Gridmap file needs to be present. Shares configuration files with system ssh.

Grid Setup Requirments

Jim Basney presented some slides which discussed what grid organizations needed to do to a globus distribution. He proposed three additional setup packages which would provide CA certificates and scripts as well as virtual organization membership information to MDS.

Grid Configuration Tool

Nadya Williams demonstrated a prototype configuration tool. The tool manages localization data from a central datastore and provides scripts to regenerate needed configuration files.

Localization Concepts

The rest of the meeting was spent discussing packaging and configuration concepts. The discussion was free-wheeling so I have tried to explain it in three different pages:
Setup Packages
Focuses on what setup packages should contain.
Localization
Explains what kind of information is needed for configuration files.
Bundle
Focuses on how bundles are used to deliver tailored distributions.

Notes

We did not have an opportunity to rein in the discussion because of time constraints. But here are a few notes:
  1. There needs to be some further discussion on the need for pre-install localization. The post-install advocates had trouble understanding the need for this. The pre-install group considered dynamic bundling to be a part of this localization process. Rocks is a tool that combines the two concepts.
  2. Host machine bundles were met with general disapproval.
  3. There seems to be an overlap in the content that is needed in packaging data, the SDSC configuration tool, and MDS. Nadya met with Patrick Duda (NCSA GPT developer) to discuss how we could convert between GPT data and her configuration database. I need to to discuss this more with Phil and Nadya.
  4. Scott Gose presented his pillar organization for Globus Toolkit 2.0 which was met with general approval.
  5. The MDS developers could not attend this meeting. I will be organizing a telecom with them RSN (Real Soon Now). We did go over this page which is a summary of the discussion that John McGee and I had a while back.
  6. cfengine and some linux configuration tool (Joe?) were suggested as having similar functionality to the Grid Configuration Tool.
  7. Erik Paulson demonstrated an interview script that rebundled and installed the Condor-G package using GPT. He proposes using this for Condor-G in the April release.
  8. Eric Blau gave the GPT developers some insight for the GPT 2.0 effort.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all of the attendees for coming. This kind of fruitful discussion helps us plan the NMI deployment tools.
No longer part of the R1 release.
Last modified: Tue Mar 19 17:51:13 Central Standard Time 2002