Difference between revisions of "Administrator Guide"

Revision as of 14:51, 9 April 2008

  This Guide covers the installation, configuration, and maintenance of gCore.

Prerequisites

The following software is a prerequisite for the installation of gCore:

• A platform compatible or made compatible with GT requirements.
• J2SE 1.5.08 SDK or greater. Sun's reference implementation is recommended, but versions from IBM, HP, or BEA should work equally well.
• Ant 1.6.5+ to build gCF sources or to develop services with it.
• a SVN client to install gCore from the SVN repository.
• GNU tar to install gCore from archived distributions.
• sudo to execute shell commands with controlled super-user privileges.

Running gCore in a secure infrastructure raises further prerequisites:

• A ntp server to synchronise your clock with other machines' for correct credential validation.
• [coming soon]

Finally, at least static IP address (if not a DNS name) is needed for all but the simplest testing scenarios.

Installation

gCore may be installed from a SVN repository, or else from pre-packaged archives.

In the first case, installing gCore is tantamount to downloading it into a directory of choice, the gCore location. In the second case, installing gCore is simply matter of expanding the downloaded archive into the the gCore location. In either case, proceed to the installation as a a non-privileged user with read and write permissions for the gCore location.

At the end of the process, the gCore location should contain the following structure:

|-bin
|
|-config
|
|-endorsed
|
|-etc
|
|-lib
|
|-libexec
|
|-share

Some folders are of immediate interest to administrators and developers alike:

Configuration

Configuring the installation can be roughly distributed across the following steps: configuring the environment, the container, the gHN associated with a running instance of the container, and the operation of the gHN in a secure infrastructure.

Configuring the Environment

Define an environment variable GLOBUS_LOCATION and point it to the installation directory. Assuming a bash shell:

export GLOBUS_LOCATION = ...absolute path to your gCore location...

Adding $GLOBUS_LOCATION/bin to your PATH environment variable is also highly recommended:

export PATH = $PATH:$GLOBUS_LOCATION/bin

Finally, build gCF form sources requires to set an environment variable BUILD_LOCATION to the location from which ant will be invoked and where temporary build structures and artefacts will be located:

export BUILD_LOCATION = ...absolute path to your build location...

Configuring the Container

Specify the hostname of your machine as the value of logicalHost parameter in the container's configuration file $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus_wsrf_core/server-config.wsdd:

<parameter name="logicalHost" value="..yourhostname..."/>

Configuring the gHN

In the gHN's configuration file $GLOBUS_LOCATION/config/GHNConfig.xml, override wherever appropriate the default values of the following properties:

Configuring Logging

A running gCore container will produce extensive logs in accordance with the log4j configuration directives container in $GLOBUS_LOCATION/container-log4j.properties. By default, the container logs in a file container.log and with a DEBUG level for all the gCore code components. container.log is created in the location from which the container is started.

Configuring Security

[coming soon]

Verify the Installation

To verify the installation, start the container with the script $GLOBUS_LOCATION/bin/gcore-start-container. Assuming PATH is set as recommended above:

gcore-start-location

will suffice. Any instance of the container which is already running should be automatically kill-ed and the new instance should log the list of deployed services in nohup.out and detailed information about the startup of local services in container.log. Both files will be created in location from which the container was started, Lack of visible errors in both files indicates a successful gCore installation.