YAIM Values for FTS Version 2.0.

WebServer Configuration

For configuring the FTS WebServer, you need:

# Node names
[...]
FTS_HOST=%FTS_WS_HOSTNAME%.$MY_DOMAIN
[...]

# BDII/GIP specific settings
[...]
BDII_FTS_URL="ldap://$FTS_HOST:2170/mds-vo-name=resource,o=grid"
[...]

# FTS config file for web-service
FTS_DBURL=... # The JDBC url for connecting to the DB
FTS_HOST_ALIAS=prod-fts-ws.cern.ch

Where %FTS_WS_HOSTNAME% is the name of the host where the FTS Web Server is installed (in case you use dns aliases, put the name of the dns alias here)

In case the FTS WS and the Agents are configure din the same file (usually this is the case) you don't need to provide the DB username and password, since these are taken from the Agents parameters (see below). In case you have separate files for the WS and the Agent, you need to provide these values using the parameters:

FTS_DB_TYPE=ORACLE
FTS_DB_USER=...
FTS_DB_PASSWORD=...

FTA Configuration

The FTA configuration is slightly more complex. The first thing you have to specify are the hot that will be used by the FTA and what shoudl be the agents that will be installed into these hosts. For example, you can have:

FTA_MACHINES="ONE TWO FIVE"

FTA_AGENTS_ONE_HOSTNAME="fts101.cern.ch"
FTA_AGENTS_ONE="CERN-BNL BNL-CERN CERN-INFN INFN-CERN"

FTA_AGENTS_TWO_HOSTNAME="fts102.cern.ch"
FTA_AGENTS_TWO="CERN-FNAL FNAL-CERN CERN-RAL RAL-CERN"

FTA_AGENTS_FIVE_HOSTNAME="fts105.cern.ch"
FTA_AGENTS_FIVE="DTEAM ALICE ATLAS CMS LHCB OPS"

In that case, two hosts will be used for the ChannelAgents (fts101.crn.ch and fts102.cern.h) and one for the VOAgents (fts105.cern.ch). Please note that this example is taken from the production FTS at CERN, and doesn't force you to have the agents spread on different boxes (this choice mainly depends on the load you expect on your setup). You have then to specify the type of each agent, like:

FTA_CERN_BNL="URLCOPY" 
FTA_BNL_CERN="URLCOPY" 
FTA_CERN_INFN="URLCOPY" 
FTA_INFN_CERN="URLCOPY" 
FTA_CERN_FNAL="SRMCOPY" 
FTA_FNAL_CERN="URLCOPY" 
FTA_CERN_RAL="URLCOPY" 
FTA_RAL_CERN="URLCOPY" 

FTA_ATLAS="VOAGENT"
FTA_ALICE="VOAGENT"
FTA_LHCB="VOAGENT"
FTA_DTEAM="VOAGENT"
FTA_CMS="VOAGENT"
FTA_OPS="VOAGENT"

The naming convention is quite straightforward: FTA_%INSTANCE_NAME% where %INTANCE_NAME% is one of the names speficied in the FTA_AGENTS_* parameter. Please note that the character "-" shoudl be converted in "_". The supported types are:

• Channel Agent types: URLCOPY (transfers are excuted using 3rd party gridftp copy), SRMCOPY (uses srmcopy)
• VO Agent types: VOAGENT. VOAGENT_PYTHON is no longer supported!

The only mandatory parameters are the Database type, username, password and connection string:

FTA_GLOBAL_DBTYPE=ORACLE
FTA_GLOBAL_DB_CONNECTSTRING=...
FTA_GLOBAL_DB_USER=...
FTA_GLOBAL_DB_PASSWORD=..

In addition, please leave the verbosity level of the log files to INFO:

FTA_GLOBAL_LOG_PRIORITY=INFO

The values apply to all the agents. In fact, we defined three diffenet scopes for the configuration parameters:

• GLOBAL: the values of the parameter are used for all the agents (VOs and Channels). The parameters mentioned above are example of global parameters. This kind of parameters can also be used to define default values that could be overwritten by more detailed scopes.
• TYPEDEFAULT_%TYPE%: the values are used for all the agents of the same type. The supported types are listed above: URLCOPY, SRMCOPY, VOAGENT. Please note that in this context URLCOPY and SRMCOPY are considered as different types, even if both refer to ChannelAgents. The same concept also apply to VOAGENT
• %INSTANCE_NAME%: the values are specific to the instance of the agent identified by %INSTANCE_NAME% (the name of the VO or the Channel the agent is responsible for).

In order to specify the FTA configuration paremeters, we adoped the following naming convention:

FTA_%SCOPE%_%PARAM_NAME%

where %SCOPE% is one of the values listed above and %PARAM_NAME% is the name of the parameter you want to set. For example, in case of FTA_GLOBAL_LOG_PRIORITY, GLOBAL is the scope and LOG_PRIORITY is the confguration paremeter name.

Usually, the paramters have a meaningful default value, but in some circumstances you may want to tune some of these values:

• Parameters related to ChannelAgents (URLCOPY or SRMCOPY):
  • GUC_MAXTRANSFERS: The maximum number of concurrent transfers the agent will process (act as a hard-limit on the number of files specified for a channel). Default is 50.
  • GUC_TRANSFERTIMEOUT: The timeout in seconds for completing the transfer. In case of srmcopy transfer, the total timeout is this value multiplied by the number of files speficied in the srmcopy request. Default is 600 for URLCOPY and 0 (no timeout) for SRMCOPY. Recommended value is 1800 for both types.
  • GUC_HTTPTIMEOUT: The http timeout for all the SOAP calls. Default is -1 (i.e. the gLite transfer-url-copy default applies: 40 seconds).
  • ACTIONS_SRMVERSION: The default SRM version to be used when looking for an SRM endpoint (both source and/or destination) in case of ambiguity. Default is 1.1
  • ACTIONS_SRMVERSIONPOLICY: The policy to apply when choosing an SRM version in case of ambiguity, i.e. if the specified SURL (either source or destination) does not contain enough information to uniquely identify an endpoint (i.e. port and/or application path). Allowed values are:
    • default: use the value specified by GUC_SRMVERSION
    • with-space-token: choose 2.2 if a space token is provided; use default mechanism otherwise.
    • force: deprecated. Do not use.

In addition, for ChannelAgents, we recommend you to set:

        FTA_TYPEDEFAULT_%TYPE%_FSM_ENABLEHOLD=false     # since the "Hold" state is a VO policy, only VOAgents should move files to this state 
        FTA_TYPEDEFAULT_%TYPE%_AGENT_CANCEL_INTERVAL=60 # Check if there are ative transfer to cancel every minute 
        FTA_TYPEDEFAULT_%TYPE%_AGENT_DEFAULTINTERVAL=5  # Execute the ChannelAgent operations (fetch new transfers, check the status of the active ones) every 5 seconds instead of every 3 seconds, in order to reduce the load on the !DBServer
      

• Parameters related only to URLCOPY ChannelAgents :
  • GUC_STREAMS The maximum number of streams that would be used for a gridftp transfer (act as a hard-limit on the number of streams specifiedfor a channel). Default is 10.
  • GUC_SRMPUTTIMEOUT: The timeout for completing an SrmPut operation and rtriving a valid Turl to be used for the transfer. Default is 60. Recommended value is 180
  • GUC_SRMGETTIMEOUT: The timeout for completing an SrmGet operation and rtriving a valid Turl to be used for the transfer. Default is 60. Recommended value is 180
  • GUC_SRMPUTDONETIMEOUT: The timeout for releasing the Turl returned by the SrmPut call. Default is 60. Recommended value is 180
  • GUC_SRMGETDONETIMEOUT: The timeout for releasing the Turl returned by the SrmGet call. Default is 60. Recommended value is 180
  • GUC_TRANSFERMARKERSTIMEOUT: The timeout between two consequent transfer markers: if the gridftp server is not returning markers with at least this frequency the transfer is considered stuck and therefore it will be aborted. Default is 120.

• Parameters related only to SRMCOPY ChannelAgents :
  • GUC_MAXBULKSIZE: the maximum size for a SrmCopy bulk request. Default is 100
  • GUC_SRMCOPYDIRECTION: the direction of an srm copy transfer. Can assume the following values:
    • pull: the transfer is driven by the destination SRM
    • push: the transfer is driven by the source SRM
    • default: the transfer service default (usually pull).
  • AGENT_CHECK_INTERVAL: the frequency for checking the status of active SrmCopy requests. Recommended value is 30.

In addition, for SRMCOPY ChannelAgent, in order to prevent an issue with dCache 1.6.6 we recommend you to set:

          FTA_TYPEDEFAULT_SRMCOPY_ACTIONS_SURLNORMALIZATION=compact-with-port 
        

• Parameters you need to set only for VOAGENT VOAgents :
  • PYTHONPATH: the paths where the python modules and strategies can be loaded. Unless you have a setup that differs from the default one, please set this value to: ${GLITE_LOCATION}/lib/python2.2/site-packages:${GLITE_LOCATION}/lib/python/glite/fts/strategies/
  • ACTIONS_RETRYMODULE: the name of the python module that provides the retry logic for the VO. We recommend you to set this value to smarter_retry
  • ACTIONS_RETRYPARAMS: the parameter passed to the retry logic. The format of this string depends on the strategy module itself. For the smarter_retry module, this values looks like:

    "MaxFailures = 3 ; HoldEnabled = false ; OverwriteFailedFiles = true ; OverwriteExistingFiles = false ; DefaultRetryDelay = 300 ; RetryDelayForTimeoutOnGet = 1800 ; RetryDelayForDestFileExists = 300 ;"
        

    Hopefully, the parameters' names are self-explanatory. Please note that in case a VO requires to reduce the retry delay, you may need also to modify the parameter AGENT_RETRY_INTERVAL, that by deault is set to 60 seconds. For example, if a VO wants to have a Retry delay of 30 seconds, you may need to specify:

    FTA_%VO%_AGENT_RETRY_INTERVAL=30
    FTA_%VO%_ACTIONS_RETRYPARAMS="MaxFailures = 3 ; HoldEnabled = false ; OverwriteFailedFiles = true ; OverwriteExistingFiles = false ; DefaultRetryDelay = 30 ; RetryDelayForTimeoutOnGet = 1800 ; RetryDelayForDestFileExists = 300 ;"
        

There are many other aspects of the FTA you could configure, but for a production server we suggest you to limit to the configuration parameters illustrated in this page; if these are not sufficient, you can have a look at the FTS documentation or contact fts-support.

Explicitly setting an agent name

The mandatory Name parameter of the agents configuration is already set with a sensible default by the YAIM scripts. This parameter is used by the channel agents as the name of the managed channel and by the VO agents as the name of the managed VO.

In case you should set it explitly, you should use the parameter FTA_%AGENT%_AGENT_NAME.

Troubleshooting

ERROR: The variable FTA_TYPEDEFAULT_%TYPE_%PARAM_NAME% was specified in the configuration file.
This is not used by any of the agents configured in the file.

This means that you're setting a property for a type that is not used (it usually happens when some FTA_TYPEDEFAULT_SRMCOPY_* properties are set but all the Channel agents are URLCOPY). The solution is to simply comment out or remove the lines concerning the unused parameters.

In case you're using diffente types of VOAgents at the same time, you're likely to receive this error:

Maintainers: GavinMcCance, PaoloTedesco, AkosFrohner