WLCG Package Collection

Introduction

As discussed during our 4th meeting, volunteer sites will publish the packages they have installed so that they can be compared against reference versions.

After that meeting, discussions have started about the suitability of Pakiti for this task. The current version of Pakiti (v2) does not match our requirements (e.g. to store an history) and the next version of Pakiti (v3) is still under development so it cannot be used right now.

As a consequence, to avoid unnecessary delays, we will use a dedicated tool (described below) to gather the initial lists of packages. Then, once Pakiti v3 has matured, we will reconsider this decision and hopefully converge to use Pakiti.

Description

In order to collect the list of installed packages at volunteer sites, a lightweight client has to be used. It sends its data (in encrypted form) to a collector server located at CERN. The information sent is protected and only the WLCG MW Officer (and the team working with him) can access this information.

Technical details:

• the data is encrypted using "openssl smime"
• the encrypted data is sent over HTTP
• the received data is stored in a MySQL database

Installation

In order to report the list of installed packages, a single script has to be installed. The easiest solution is to install it as an rpm. It is available at the WLCG software repository. If your machine already uses this repository, the following command is enough to install the rpm:

  # yum install wlcg-package-reporter

The recommended way to use this script is daily, via cron. To do so, it should be enough to execute, once for all:

  # wlcg-package-reporter --site MY-SITE --cron > /etc/cron.d/wlcg-package-reporter

Notes:

• the wlcg-package-reporter does not require root privileges.
• it is very important to specify the correct site name when executing wlcg-package-reporter (this information cannot be reliably guessed...)

References

For more information:

• for any question: wlcg-package-reporter@cernNOSPAMPLEASE.ch
• wlcg-package-reporter 's man page