gLite UI tarball distribution

Introduction

We provide the glite 3.1 and 3.2 User Interface as a tarball distribution. This distribution consists of two tarballs, one containing the glite software, the other containing external dependencies which are usually not installed on the host. The latter contains a string "external". The tarballs are versioned by the UI version.

Availability

A tarball distribution of the glite 3.2 User Interface is available here (only 64bit):

• SL5_x86_64 http://grid-deployment.web.cern.ch/grid-deployment/download/relocatable/glite-UI/SL5_x86_64

A tarball distribution of the glite 3.1 User Interface is available here (only 32bit):

• SL4_i686 http://grid-deployment.web.cern.ch/grid-deployment/download/relocatable/glite-UI/SL4_i686

Releases intended for PPS are prefixed with PPS_ and contain also the creation date.

Installation

Download the two tarballs from the repository. Create an INSTALL_ROOT directory for the distribution. Then cd into this directory and untar both tarballs. As an example, for pre-producion :

mkdir /gLite
cd /gLite
tar zxvf glite-UI-3.1.13-0_2008-04-18.tar.gz
tar zxvf glite-UI-3.1.13-0-external_2008-04-18.tar.gz

Configuration

General

Make sure that your site-info.def file contains at least the following variables, plus the variables needed to configure a UI, which can be found here: UI configuration variables ( To find out the values of UI configuration variables go to the CIC portal and follow the links for your VO):

INSTALL_ROOT=base_install_dir
GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT=${INSTALL_ROOT}/external
GRID_ENV_LOCATION=${GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT}/etc/profile.d
FUNCTIONS_DIR=${INSTALL_ROOT}/glite/yaim/functions

INSTALL_ROOT is the directory in which the glite middleware is installed. GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT is the directory in which the external dependencies are installed. You must set GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT=${INSTALL_ROOT}/external. Note that other configurations have not been tested.

The variable CA_REPOSITORY is also used in the configuration of the TAR UI and it's defined by default in YAIM. Check the site-info.pre section for more information. In general this variable can be defined by the user if another repository is used.

To configure the TAR UI run the following command in INSTALL_ROOT (In this example site-info.def is also there):

cd ${INSTALL_ROOT}/glite/yaim/bin
./yaim -c -s <your site-info.def> -n UI_TAR

To use the tarball you have to source one file (*.sh for bash, *csh for tcsh): $GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT/etc/profile.d/grid-env.(c)sh

Handling of certificates

Certificate installation and CRL cron job handling may be taken care of by YAIM or it can be left to the administrator, if for instance the CAs and CRLs are already installed and maintained (possibly in a central area).

YAIM will install the CA files if no CRL file (*.r0) is installed (or they are all out of date) in X509_CERT_DIR. If YAIM finds certificates installed, it considers the user responsible for maintaining them. The criterion used by YAIM to decide if a directory contains certificates is find $X509_CERT_DIR -mtime -1 -name '*.r0'.

Be aware that the directory pointed by X509_CERT_DIR must exist and the user must have write permissions or otherwise YAIM will fail. X509_CERT_DIR default value is /etc/grid-security/certificates. Redefine this variable in site-info.def if you want to use another location and also define it in the shell environment before starting yaim.

If YAIM installed the certificates, it also creates a cron job to maintain the CRL files up to date.

Handling of VOMS server certificates

X509_VOMS_DIR is set to {GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT}/etc/grid-security/vomsdir by default. In case you are maintaining a vomsdir directory and you want your TAR UI to point to it, please, follow these steps:

1. Create a directory called services in the same directory where you have your site-info.def
2. Create a file called glite-ui_tar under the new services/ directory containing X509_VOMS_DIR with the new path.
3. Reconfigure your TAR UI

Using Python

The externals tarball contains a complete 32bit Python distribution (currently Python 2.3.4). It is included to facilitate the usage of the UI tarball on x86_64 machines. However yaim is not configuring the environment to use this version of Python. It is up to the user to decide and change his/her environment accordingly. The Python files can be found in GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT/user/bin and GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT/usr/lib. Please note that we do not officially support the UI_TAR on x86_64 yet. Nevertheless, using the 32bit Python various users report that one can use the UI_TAR on x86_64 machines.

Structure and content of the tarball

The file INSTALL_ROOT/glite/etc/relocatable-release.txt contains a list of all rpms installed on the machine where the tarball was created. A subset of them is in the tarball.

The file GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT/content.txt contains a list of rpms that were used to create the externals tarball. The externals tarball contains files of an rpm based UI installation that are not in /opt/classads, /opt/d-cache, /opt/edg, /opt/glite, /opt/globus, /opt/gpt or /opt/lcg. These files are usually not found on an SLC4 installation. Currently we have no reference SL4 installation that guarantees to UI tarball to work but we plan to do so. It might be possible that the tarball UI does not work on your machine because of some missing files. If this is the case you can either install the relevant rpms or add the files under GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT. Don't forget to update the files GLITE_EXTERNAL_ROOT/etc/profile.d/grid-env.(c)sh accordingly.

Main differences to the 3.0 tarball UI

• The configuration target for the 3.1 tarball UI is UI_TAR (no longer TAR_UI).
• The configuration files to source are written into INSTALL_ROOT/external/etc/profile.d (no longer in INSTALL_ROOT/etc/profile.d).
• One has to source one or two files (see comment above): INSTALL_ROOT/external/etc/profile.d/grid-env.(c)sh and INSTALL_ROOT/external/etc/profile.d/lcgenv.(c)sh (the file grid_env.(c)sh no longer exists)

Known issues

Note: for configuration issues in the UI tarball, check the yaim clients known issues section in the YAIM guide.

• In glite 3.1 the following issue exists, reported in Bug #56446 and GGUS #52114. Symlinks to non existing directories. The recommendation from the developers is to use the corresponding python version. The integration team is working on another solution at the moment.

Contact

Ricardo Mendes Maria Alandes Pradillo

-- AndreasUnterkircher - 23 Oct 2007