Appendix A. GT 4.1.0 Call for Community Testing: GridFTP

1. What is a "Call for Community Testing"?

A Call for Community Testing is a mechanism to notify our users that new Globus code is available for testing in the field. Through these calls, we hope to expose the code to a wide variety of usage scenarios early in its development process. The ultimate goals are to catch bugs that have historically been found only after final releases, and to elicit feedback from the community on ways our software can be improved.

2. Participating in the GridFTP Testing Call is easy!

  1. Install the software in a non-production environment. Use the 4.1.0 distribution from http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/development/; the code can also be retrieved directly from CVS using the tag globus_4_1_0.
  2. Exercise the software.
  3. Log your experiences in http://bugzilla.globus.org/globus/ under the "GridFTP" product. Please mention 4.1.0 explicitly in the body of the report.
  4. If you have any questions or comments regarding this component, join the gridftp-user@globus.org list to participate in discussions with other testers. (To subscribe, read the instructions here.)
  5. Optional: Consider sending descriptions of your tests to gridftp-dev@globus.org so that we might use them to build standard tests in the future. (To subscribe, read the instructions here.)

2.1. Testing period

The testing period for this call is [FIXME: date range].

3. About GridFTP

GridFTP is a high-performance, secure, reliable data transfer protocol optimized for high-bandwidth wide-area networks. The GridFTP protocol is based on FTP, the highly-popular Internet file transfer protocol. We have selected a set of protocol features and extensions defined already in IETF RFCs and added a few additional features to meet requirements from current data grid projects.

4. Reasons for testing GridFTP

[FIXME: include the reasons why this component needs testing]

5. Technology dependencies

GridFTP depends on the following GT components:

  • Pre-WS Authentication / Authorization
  • C Common Libraries
  • XIO

GridFTP depends on the following 3rd party software:

  • OpenSSL (version included in release)

6. Environment/build parameters and other special conditions to test

  1. [FIXME]