News

Thursday September 9, a full day dCache tutorial is organized by the German dCache support group in the context of the International GridKa school of computing.

• European Middleware Initiative, EMI started Mai 1. According to the EU Factsheet, the objectives of EMI are : The European Middleware Initiative brings together the major middleware providers in Europe to deliver a consolidated set of middleware components for deployment in EGI, PRACE and other Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs). dCache is funded by EMI in the context of SA1 and JRA1 with 1.25 FTE.
• dCache Articles
• Security
  • dCache.org is introducing a new mailing list :
    security at dcache dot org dCache user should report problems or bugs to this list if there is the suspicion that the issue is security related or if the report may contain confidential information. (e.g. passwords). Only a very restricted number of people have access to this particular mailing list.
• Newletters and announcements.
• Chimera :
  In order to be prepared for the first year of LHC datataking, we recommend to upgrade the pnfs filesystem to chimera. Please checkout the migration instructions and give it a try. You can evaluate the entire migration procedure in a safe test environment. Some sites already started the migration end of last year. Up to know, the NDGF Tier I and about 10 dCache Tier II are operating chimera. No problems have been reported yet. More information is available from our documentation area. The main advantages of chimera are :
  • Chimera scales nicely with the hardware performance and the database backend.
  • You may run regular SQL queries to collect maintainance and monitoring information of the chimera filesystem.
  • File system ACL inheritance is only available with Chimera. With pnfs, newly created directory will get the default set of ACL's. With Chimera it will inherit its parent ACLs .

  Chimera upgrade schedule
  Tier 1's NDGF : done IN2P3 : done gridKa CMS : done Atlas : done SARA : done Triumf : done FERMI : scheduled : N/A BNL : scheduled : N/A PIC : scheduled : N/A	Tier II's DESY Atlas : done CMS : done ILC, DESY-generic : done H1 Resilient : done Hera : done Aachen : done Wuppertal : done

• The dCache wiki : In addition to the Book, we offer a wiki were you may find some more helpful information. Check the link to findout on how you can contribute to the wiki with advise, documentation or tools.

• 1.9.9 pre-production.
• 1.9.8 production, recommended
• 1.9.7 production.
• 1.9.6 is depricated.
• 1.9.5 Golden Release will be supported for the duration of the 2010/2011 LHC run period.
• 1.9.4 is depricated.

• Time Based Releases : The dCache project is moving away from feature based releases towards Time Based Releases. As the name already implices, this essentially means that we will be better in predicting when a release is being published. The drawback is that features which don't make it into the repository till some time before the release is due, just won't be part of that release. The advantage is that sites can do better planing in upgrading and that the synchronization with our distributors is eased.

Golden Release

• Golden Release : The Golden Release (1.9.5) is meant to be maintained throughout the entire first round of LHC data taking.
• Version 1.9.5 is out. Please make yourself familiar with the release notes. 1.9.5 includes :
  • File System Access Control Lists (ACL's), as already in 1.9.3.
  • The asynchronous srmLs, as already in 1.9.3.
  • Tape System Protection. This feature allows to restrict "Tape Read Access" to a white list of DN/FQANs.