Appendix F. Call for Community Testing: 4.1.0 WS MDS Trigger Service

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 WS MDS Trigger Service 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 "MDS4" 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 mds-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 mds-dev@globus.org so that we might use them to build standard tests in the future. (To subscribe, read the instructions here.)

3. Testing period

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

4. About WS MDS Trigger Service

The Trigger Service collects data from resources on the grid and, if administrator defined rules match, can perform various actions. An example use is to send email when queue length on a compute resource goes over a threshold value.

5. Reasons for testing WS MDS Trigger Service

Many interesting/hard-to-diagnose bugs previously found in MDS components have been discovered in large-scale wide-area testing in the presence of unexpected failure conditions (for example, network failures or resource failure). Such conditions are difficult to recreate in a restricted testing environment.

6. Components affected by WS MDS Trigger Service

The Trigger Service depends on the following GT components:

The Trigger Service depends on the following 3rd party software:

  • None

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

Especially of interest are:

  • Index deployments over wide area networks
  • Index deployments involving large numbers of registered resources
  • Indexing of large GRAM installations (monitoring large numbers of nodes via Ganglia and Hawkeye