Subsections

1. Overview

The European DataGrid (EDG) operates an application testbed which allows users from various application areas to test the EDG software in a semi-production environment. Volunteer sites provides the hardware on which run the necessary EDG services. This manual describes the installation of the EDG software to allow your site to join the application testbed.

In parallel, EDG operates a development testbed to test new releases of the EDG software before deployment on the application testbed. The descriptions in this manual are likely to lag behind the software in the development release, but is nonetheless useful.

1.1 EDG Services

Certificate Authority

Virtual Organization Membership Service

Computing Element

Storage Element

Replica Location Service

Resource Broker

Information System

  1. Please read the EDG Usage Guidelines which can be found on the WP6 documentation web page.

  2. Ensure that prerequisites listed in section 1.2 are satisfied.

  3. Based on the size and complexity of your planned testbed site decide whether you want to use LCFG, provided by WP4, or do with manual installation. For small sites, or sites constrained by their current sysadmin practice manual installation is recommended. If you decide to use LCFG setup an an LCFG server [See chapter 2 for instructions]. In the very near future configuration files for a new version of LCFG (LCFGng) will be available. You should consider using this. Differences are documented by WP4 and a reference is given in chapter 2.

  4. You should request host certificates as specified in chapter 4. Additionally, it is recommended that you request a user certificate for yourself to test the installation.
  5. Download and install needed packages on your host following the instructions given in the next sections of this document. In case you are using LCFG also download the configuration files of the wanted version from the edg CVS web page.

  6. Follow the procedures outlined in Section 4 for each of the machine type you intend to install.

  7. Test your installation as described in Section 5.
  8. Contact the edg integration team to announce your site being ready for being included in the edg testbed.

1.2 Prerequisites

The following is a list of prerequisites for installation of the European DataGrid software.

  1. The current reference platform for EDG Middleware is RedHat Linux 6.2 with all of the recommended package and kernel upgrades. This does not imply that the software will not work on other versions, other Linux flavors (like Debian, S.u.S.E., etc.), or other architectures (e.g. Solaris). It just means that the RedHat Linux 6.2 is the only tested platform and that others will not be supported for Testbed 1. The move to RedHat Linux 7.3 is scheduled for spring 2003.

  2. All RPMs for Testbed 1.4.x have been created with RPMv3 to ensure maximum portability even if the patched version of RedHat 6.2 supports RPMv4.

  3. All the nodes in your farm must be NTP (Network Time Protocol) clients to make sure their clocks are synchronized with all other Testbed 1 machines (desynchronization is one common reason of Globus job submission failures). See 8.1 for further details.

  4. If your site consists of multiple machines, then you must be running a shared file system. In particular for job submissions to work correctly, each worker account must have a shared home area on all machines.

  5. For all but the simplest sites, you will need a local resource management system (batch system). Currently PBS and LSF are supported by EDG.

  6. Request host and user certificates (see 8.2.1).

1.3 EDG specific defaults

Most of the EDG software is installed under the root directory /opt/edg. The Globus Toolkit(TM) version 2.0 is installed under /opt/globus. Some nodes use parts of the 2.4 release of globus in parallel. These components can be found under /opt/globus-24. Be aware that some of the packages might not be not relocatable.

1.4 Obtaining EDG Software

The package repository, hosted by CC-IN2P3, provides access to the packaged Globus, DataGrid, and required external software. All software is packaged as source and binary RPM files. A central CVS repository, intended mainly for developers, maintains the sources of the DataGrid code.

In addition the CVS server maintains the configuration files and examples needed if your site is based on LCFG these can be found under edg-release. Contact the Integration team to get information about the currently deployed version.

All of the packages are available directly through a web interface. However, given the sheer number of packages in the EDG Testbed release, this is convenient only for downloading individual packages.

The most convenient access is via a set of configuration files. These files contain links to various subsets of the recommended RPMs. The wget command can be used to retrieve all of the referenced RPMs. See the EDG packages link on the WP6 website for further details.

If wget is not installed on your system you can get it from rpmfind.net. More recent version of wget, in particular the one distributed with RH 7.2, does not work correctly. The version referenced here is recommended.


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