GOC Service Update Tuesday, May 24th at 13:00 UTC

The GOC will upgrade the following services beginning Tuesday, May 24th at 13:00 UTC. The GOC reserves 8 hours in the unlikely event unexpected problems are encountered.

Condor Collector
Install HTCondor-CE-View, a web based monitoring tool that displays attributes of HTCondor-CEs 

Oasis
Conduct a security drill, temporarily blank two repositories

OIM
Color coding Search by Signer results for user certs (OSGPKI-400)

TICKET
Preserving formatting in blog posts (TICKET-124)

WWW
Prevent Apache from requiring a client certificate (HOME-5, 29653) Configure Apache to redirect http to https (same tickets)

All services
Operating system updates; reboots will be required. The usual HA mechanisms will be used, but some services will experience brief outages.

Announcing OSG Software versions 3.3.12 and 3.2.38

We are pleased to announce OSG Software versions 3.3.12 and 3.2.38.

Both 3.3.12 and 3.2.38 include:
* VO Package v66 - final wave of OSG CA transitions

Changes to OSG 3.3.12 include:
* HTCondor-CE-BOSCO: Setup a CE with only SSH access to the cluster
* HTCondor 8.4.6: Fixes serious regression in HTCondor 8.4.5
* CVMFS 2.2.2: See Release Notes for important upgrade information
* OSG CE packages will no longer install GRAM components
* BeStMan on EL7 platforms
* HTCondor-CE 2.0.5: HTCondor-CE-CEView bug fixes, support HTCondor-CE-BOSCO
* BLAHP 1.18.19: Fix memory request for PBS, updated SLURM support
* Pegasus 4.6.1: Updated from version 4.3.1
* osg-pki-tools 1.2.17: Fix timeout handling, improved error messages
* osg-configure 1.4.0: configuration of HTCondor-CE-BOSCO plus other changes
* HTCondor 8.5.4 in the Upcoming repository

Release notes and pointers to more documentation can be found at:

https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Documentation/Release3/Release3238
https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Documentation/Release3/Release3312

Need help? Let us know:

https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Documentation/Release3/HelpProcedure

We welcome feedback on this release!

The GOC will upgrade the following services beginning Tuesday, May 10th at 13:00 UTC.

The GOC will upgrade the following services beginning Tuesday, May 10th at 13:00 UTC.  The GOC reserves 8 hours in the unlikely event unexpected problems are encountered.

MyOSG

• Adding CILogon status to the status board OIM
• Support for email signing will be added to CILogon OSG CA user certificates.
• OSG users will be able to utilize their OSG personal certificate to receive encrypted email and prove email came from them.”
• Fixing revocation for Host certificates - Adding “Search by Signer” feature for host certs

Upcoming gratia outage

Gratia will undergo emergency maintenance this afternoon to address disk space issues. Exact timing of the outage is unknown but is being determined at this time.

Unstable and/or unavailable behavior should be expected but no loss of data is anticipated. Some GOC services (GratiaWeb and display.opensciencegrid.org, for example) will also be affected.

The OSG Operations apologizes for any inconvenience you may encounter.

GOC Service Update - Tuesday, April 26, 2016 at 13:00 UTC

The GOC will upgrade the following services beginning Tuesday, April 26 at 13:00 UTC. The GOC reserves 8 hours in the unlikely event unexpected problems are encountered.

GratiaWeb
Fix for project accounting plots
inclusion of HTML site for Google Charts
inclusion of WLCG reporting link

OIM
Increase the number of Security and Administrative contacts for a resource - release 3.52

All services
Operating system updates; reboots will be required. The usual HA mechanisms will be used, but some services will experience brief outages.

HTCondor 8.4.5 causes problems with partitionable slots

HTCondor 8.4.5 (released in OSG 3.3.11 on Tuesday, April 12) contains a bug that may affect some sites significantly. If your site uses partitionable slots on execute nodes, OSG recommends that you avoid HTCondor 8.4.5, either by skipping the update or reverting to a previous version (e.g., HTCondor 8.4.4).

(Tech details: Jobs that land on partitionable slots will fail to start about 10% of the time. The failed job correctly returns to the queue in Idle state, and HTCondor will continue trying to match and run the job which should complete eventually. But the recycling process adds inefficiencies into the overall system.)

The HTCondor development and OSG Software teams discovered the bug after the OSG release, and plan to release a patched version soon.

OSG GRAM Support Ending November 2016

As part of the OSG transition from GRAM to HTCondor-CE technology, OSG Operations and Software teams will stop supporting GRAM CE installations in early November. A site that requests support for GRAM or GRAM-based software will be asked to upgrade to HTCondor-CE instead. However, GRAM packages will remain available for sites that accept full responsibility for operation of GRAM.

Toward that goal, OSG CE convenience meta-packages (e.g., osg-ce-condor) will drop GRAM components starting with the April 12 release of OSG 3.3. The change will affect only new installations that use the osg-ce-* packages — OSG will still ship GRAM software, will document how to install GRAM, and will support GRAM in tools like osg-configure.

Other milestones that will likely occur in early 2017:

* Ending support for GRAM CEs at the OSG pilot factories, which will leave many VOs unable to run at GRAM sites

* Dropping GRAM software from the OSG software stack (starting in OSG 3.4.0)

* Removing GRAM-based code from OSG tools like osg-configure

BACKGROUND

An OSG CE is the entry point for the OSG to your local resources. At the heart of the CE is the job gateway software, which accepts incoming jobs, authorizes them, and delegates them to your batch system for execution. These days, OSG jobs come from the OSG factories and are really pilot jobs, which in turn run actual end-user jobs. Since OSG started, the Globus GRAM gatekeeper has managed grid jobs, but starting in May 2014, the OSG added another job gateway option — HTCondor-CE — that is built on core HTCondor technology. For many reasons, OSG has decided to migrate all CEs to HTCondor-CE and is today in the midst of this change.

Since August 2014, new CE installs included both HTCondor-CE and GRAM, and since December 2014, HTCondor-CE is the default job gateway software for a new site. Today, HTCondor-CE is on 60 CEs and is the sole job gateway software on many of them; the list of sites that have already migrated includes some of the largest OSG sites, as well as medium and small ones.

This is a significant technical change for OSG, but the good news is that it is well underway and has been going very smoothly for most sites. If you are still running GRAM, please consider migrating to HTCondor-CE as soon as possible (you can run both for a while, if you like). Then, once your HTCondor-CE is running well, decommission the GRAM software.