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Raven Quarterly Status Report for Q3 2009
Reporting period: Jul 1 - Sep 30 2009
PI: John H. Hartman (University of Arizona)
Major accomplishments
- Support for creating Stork groups using CoMon queries
- Prototyped
raven
tool for one-step software installation - Ported Stork repository to mod_python infrastructure
- Modified
sfa
authentication mechanism to explicitly sign arguments - Prototyped
owl
, a tool for monitoring slice health
Description of work performed during last quarter
Activities and findings
We developed
tempest
, an evolution of thepacman
tool.Tempest
separates group membership determination and package action determination into separate helper commands. This allowstempest
to support the originalpacman
format for the groups and packages files, but also arbitrary programs that produce the proper output. For example, this allowstempest
to make group membership decisions based on a CoMon query, e.g. the user can specify a group based on a CoMon query consisting of nodes that have more than a certain amount of free memory. Nodes individually and dynamically decide whether or not they belong in this group.
We developed
raven
, a tool for one-step software installation.Raven
greatly simplifies the process of deploying software packages on a slice.Raven
creates a template directory tree that the user populates with the proper GENI key and software packages.Raven
takes care of the rest, creating and signing the proper tpfiles andtempest
files, and uploads these files to the Stork repository along with the packages. At that point Stork will install these packages on all nodes in the specified slice.
We ported the Stork repository to the mod_python infrastructure of Apache. This allows the repository to take advantage of Apache's authentication and load balancing mechanisms.
We modified the SFA authentication mechanism so that authentication is done by explicitly signing the request, rather than relying on the underlying SSL protocol for authentication. This greatly simplifies the design and implementation by decoupling authentication from the underlying transport protocol.
We developed a prototype of
owl
, a service for monitoring slice health.Owl
consists of an extensible set of client-side scripts that collect information about software running in the slice. This information is sent to a centralizedowl
server that stores the information in a database. Theowl
server makes this information available via Web pages as well as in XML and JSON format. We demoedowl
at GEC5.
We continue to work on
iftd
, a data transfer daemon that will allow Stork clients to access files via a variety of transport protocols such as http, ftp, BitTorrent, and CoDeploy. Protocol handling and error handling are encapsulated in theiftd
daemon, freeing individual Raven tools from having to perform these functions. We anticipate deployingiftd
in the next quarter and it will eventually replace the arizona_transfer module the Raven tools currently use.
Project participants
- John H. Hartman (University of Arizona)
- Scott Baker (SB Software)
- Justin Cappos (University of Washington)
- Justin Samuel (University of Washington)
- Jude Nelson (University of Arizona)
Publications (individual and organizational)
- None.
Outreach activities
- None.
Collaborations
We worked closely with the following Cluster B members:
- PlanetLab -- Princeton University
- GUSH -- Williams College
Other Contributions
- None.