10/08/2011 CernVM-FS 2.0 Released

16/02/2012 CernVM-FS 2.0.10

Release 2.0.10 has an updated dependency to cvmfs-keys 1.2.  The new cvmfs-keys package contains the public master signing keys stored by Cern IT.  Currently, repositories are not yet signed with the new keys.  The new keys will be started to get used probably in a couple of months from now.
Adjustments and bugfixes:

• Fixed a race condition when umount and mount are executed in quick succession. Many thanks to Stephen Jones for reporting and helping us debugging it.
• Fixed a bug that prevented catalog certificates to be cached
• Fixed handling of DNS timeouts; DNS timeouts are subject to the CernVM-FS timout settings
• Added a command reset error counters to cvmfs-talk, which can be used to acknowledge I/O errors and to stop the Nagios check from reporting
• Moved the X-CVMFS2 header to user-agent and added the proxy server

The release has been running on the CERN pre-production nodes for a couple of days.

23/01/2012 CernVM-FS 2.0.8

Release 2.0.8 is a server only release and fixes a permission problem when multiple user accounts are used to update and publish the repository.

23/01/2012 CernVM-FS 2.0.7

Release 2.0.7 has a couple of bugfixes. The release has been running on the CERN pre-production nodes for the last week.

• A race condition in the mount helper is fixed by delegating changes in /etc/mtab to fuse (Savannah ticket 89961).  As a result, the file system type of repositories is "fuse", not "cvmfs".  If you rely on mount -t cvmfs, please use mount -t fuse | grep "^cvmfs2[[:space:]]" instead. Thanks to Chris Hollowell for reporting.
• The mount helper accepts the -n option (for not editing /etc/mtab at all), which is apparently required by some OpenVZ installations. See also Savannah, thanks to Carlo de Vecchi for reporting.
• Fixed a bug when opening large files (>2G) for the first time. Thanks to Sarah Williams for reporting.
• Fixed a presentation bug in cvmfs-talk in case CVMFS_REPOSITORIES is undefined an no repository is specified in the options string. Thanks to Dave Dykstra for reporting.
• For better performance, files are internally opened with O_DIRECT and O_NOATIME flags.
• Several bugfixes and improvements for the server tools.  See Savannah tickets 89922, 90090, 90208, 90422. Thanks to Dan Bradley for patches and reports. Note that the redirfs kernel module has been updated as well.
  

08/12/2011 CernVM-FS 2.0.6

Release 2.0.6 has a couple of small improvements and bugfixes:

• Fixed a couple of presentation errors
• Fixed some issues in the cvmfs service and in cvmfs-talk when CVMFS_STRICT_MOUNT is set to "no"
• Improved logging and detection of missing directories in the CernVM-FS cache directory, which can be the result of tmpwatch operating on the cache directory
• Fixed cache cleanup on startup in the case the quota limit was reduced
• Added a default quota limit of 4GB
• Server tools: added a parameter "-u" to apply the system umask instead of the default one 0755/0644
• Server tools: Removed race condition for the creation of .cvmfspublished when repositories are updated
• Server tools: fixed some script bugs that occurred when the cvmfs user has no login shell (see Savannah, thanks to Dan Bradley)

13/09/2011 CernVM-FS 2.0.4

Release 2.0.4 has a couple of small improvements and bugfixes:

• Fixed cvmfs_fsck for cache directories on xfs partitions (thanks to Andrej Filipcic for reporting)
• Fixed some presentation errors in cvmfs_config stat and cvmfs_config showconfig (the bugs affected the Nagios script as it is parsing cvmfs_config stat)
• Speed up mount helpers (see Savannah, thanks to Alessandra Forti for the analysis)
• Added repository name to syslog messages
• Report to syslog when a new catalog revision is applied
• The cvmfs_server script creates the cvmfs user on the fly if necessary

16/08/2011 CernVM-FS 2.0.3

Release 2.0.3 fixes a type in the cvmfs_config stat script that makes the Nagios check believe there is no network connectivity.  Many thanks to Ronald Starink for the fix.

16/08/2011 CernVM-FS 2.0.2

Release 2.0.2 fixes a multi-threading bug in the cache garbage collection that may result in corrupted files in the local cache.  For details, please see the Savannah bug report.  Many thanks to Alessandra Forti, Christopher Walker, and Yves Kemp for helping to debug!
Note: Corrupted files may be already in your cache without being spotted so far. Please run cvmfs_fsck -p at least once after upgrading to make sure you start with a clean cache.

This release will also write to syslog when the garbage collection is triggered.

10/08/2011 CernVM-FS 2.0.1

Release 2.0.1 fixes a bug in the build system when building 32bit binaries on 64bit hosts. This build system bug results in segfaults of the Fuse module. The 32bit RPMs of version 2.0.0 are affected as well. Thanks to David Lesny for reporting.

Description

CernVM-FS 2.0 is out. It includes several bugfixes and improvements for monitoring. This release is stable in a sense that there is a feature freeze. This version will continue to get bugfixes and small modifications absolutely necessary for LHC experiment operations.

If you're new to CernVM-FS, have a look at the examples page. A known issus page has been added to the documentation.  Also, we published some notes on how to submit a bugreport.

Version Numbers

Starting with this release, version numbers will carry a meaning rather than just being counters. That facilitates the development of new features in a different branch while having a well-understood version for daily operations.

The versioning scheme is
$(Major release).$(Minor release).$(Bugfix release).$(Reserved)

For instance, a new extended attribute required for monitoring will be included in a bugfix release. Changing the build system to CMake will result in a new minor release.

Bugfixes (Compared to CernVM-FS 0.2.76)

• Fixed a race condition when the cvmfs service starts and looks for the Fuse kernel module
• Fixed the mount table handling when the cvmfs service cannot be stopped because of open file descriptors on a CernVM-FS volume
• Fixed mount helpers for systems without the fuse group
• Fixed several bugs in cvmfs scripts on Linux flavors other than SLC5
• Fixed two file descriptor leaks when loading file catalogs
• The cvmfs_fsck utility unlinks temporary left-over file catalogs
• Several bugfixes in the CernVM-FS server tools (cf. ChangeLog)

Monitoring Features

CernVM-FS is now able to report a set of basic health and performance figures via extended attributes. That way no root privileges are required to read them out. The new cvmfs_config stat command collects these numbers and presents them in either human readable or parsable manner, like
cvmfs_config stat -v atlas.cern.ch
cvmfs_config stat atlas.cern.ch
Please note that these numbers can only be collected for mounted volumes.

These health and performance figures can be fed into a Nagios check. We provide a Nagios check in the downloads section.

Logging has improved. All open() errors except for "file not found" are reported to syslog. A proxy failover will be reported to syslog as well.

An exponential backoff in case of failed downloads has been added. That prevents request storms to proxies / web servers from applications that try to open a file in an endless loop. The backoff is triggered by consequtive download errors within 10 seconds. Many thanks to Sam Skipsey for helping us debugging such a situation.

The cache directories have been extended by a "quarantaine" folder. This folder collects corrupted files detected by cvmfs_fsck or the Fuse module. As such file corruption should not occurr unless it is caused by the underlying file system, the files in quarantaine help us to debug. They are included in the tarball produced by cvmfs_config bugreport. Please note that if you run service cvmfs restartclean, the files in quarantaine will be removed as well.

Linux Flavors Other Than SLC5/6

Although the provided RPMs are for SLC5/6 only, as of this release CernVM-FS is supposed to work on Ubuntu and SuSE as well. For those flavors it is necessary to build CernVM-FS from sources.  Please check the technical report for details.

Please keep in mind that testing on other Linux flavors is still poor. Many thanks to Rod Walker and Mattias Wadenstein for pointing out various problems on other platforms. If you find any issues, please report them to us.

Migration from CernVM-FS 0.2.7X

The client migration with RPMs is supposed to be smooth.  You can install the new RPM while CernVM-FS volumes are mounted and let automount take care of the actual update.  Please note that in this case the updated auxiliary tools such as cvmfs_fsck and cvmfs_config might not work until the updated CernVM-FS Fuse module is mounted.

If you build from sources, configure with --enable-sqlite3-builtin --enable-libcurl-builtin --enable-zlib-builtin --enable-mount-scripts --disable-server.

For the replica tools, the first replication after the update may take long time, as the retention mechanism removes all but the newest 64 snapshots.

Please update with caution. For large sites, we suggest to start with a couple of worker nodes and to update the rest of the worker nodes gradually if everything turns out to work fine.