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Jan 27, 2010


Dear dCache community,

Just in time for the next round of LHC operation, which we expect late February, nearly all Tier I's and the majority of Tier II's have been upgrading to the 1.9.5 Golden Release. The feedback, we get, is very promising. Beside other useful improvements, the file open times of 1.9.5 installations were observed to be reduced by a factor of 5 to 10  compared to 1.9.4.
On the front line of the chimera migration, we expect two more Tier I's to migrate in February, which makes it 5 out of 8 dCache Tier I's. On this occasion, Paul would like to remind you, to only schedule the migration of your production system to the chimera name-space, after you successfully practised the migration and verification of your entire name-space in a test environment. Please feel free to report any problems or questions to support at dcache dot org.

  On behave of the dCache team, I wish you all an interesting 2010.

     cheers
         patrick
Release information

WLCG declared the dCache Golden Release (1.9.5) to be the baseline service release for dCache. WLCG is asking dCache sites to consult the dCache.org download pages on the actual recommended 1.9.5 patch release.

The support for the 1.9.4 series will end first week of March 2010. The very last patch to 1.9.4-6 has been uploaded yesterday.  You may consider to schedule an upgrade to the Golden Release in case you are operating a production dCache.

Thanks to the help of our early adopters, the 1.9.5 series has been stabilized. So we recommend you upgrade to the latest patch release (which right now is 1.9.5-12) to profit from recent fixes, of which the most prominent ones are :
    • (1.9.5-10) A dCap security fix.
    • (1.9.5-10) Better write performance in case of cluster writes.
    • (1.9.5-11) The xroot-protocol data corruption fix we reported end of December 2009.
    • (1.9.5-12) Improved recovery of pools in case of a pool-host-crash.
dCache Articles


While the dCache 1.9.5 series is doomed not to receive any new features and is only worked-on to improve stability, the team is busy enhancing dCache with the upcoming 1.9.6 and 1.9.7 series. Gerd and Timur have been describing some highlights of our work on 1.9.6++
Distributed Scalable dCache SRM powered by Terracotta
The dCache SRM Server now has experimental support for distributed SRM deployment, allowing it to achieve higher availability and scalability.  The distributed functionality of the SRM server is powered by Terracotta Scalability Platform. (by Timur)

dCache provides standards based access to your data from the desktop
The most recent version of dCache supports the WebDAV protocol, providing standards based access from any user's desktop. All major operating systems are supported, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, without the need for custom client software. Support in the operating system's native file management clients provides easy and seemless integration between local storage, network drives and grid storage, with drag and drop access to browse,  copy, move, and delete files. (by Gerd)
For the full article, please visit dCache.ORG/articles
Newsflash


ROOT and the Atlas Athena framework
Mid of January Altas deployed a ROOT version, as part of its Athena framework, which suffered from a broken integration of dCap. According to Fons a patch has been applied and a new v5.22.00g is available. We don't have any information yet on how Altas is going to fix the deployed frameworks.
(gsi)dCap in Debian
Thanks to Mattias Ellert from Uppsala University, the (gsi)dCap library made it into  Debian Unstable. We are looking forward to find dCap in the official stable release.
support@dcache versus user-forum
The dCache user-forum mailing list is meant to be a forum where users can help other dCache users. The dCache developers team tries to keep an eye on the list but it is up to the individual developer whether or not to reply to a question, suggestion or remark. Please use the support@dcache.org e-mail address if your site requires help from dCache.org.

patrick.fuhrmann@dCache.org , Jan 28, 2010