SRB 3.3.1
This document describes changes for SRB 3.3.1, released April 6, 2005.
New features:
1) Extensible Schema. Supplimenting core-metadata (pre-defined
schema) and user defined metadata, the new extensible schema system
allows users to add tables to an MCAT instance and access them through
the native SRB/MCAT interfaces. See the new document
readme.dir/README.extensibleschema.
2) Real-Time Access Through SRB. SRB has been augmented with new
drivers and server-side support for accessing data from real-time data
streams. As part of this new extension, two real-time resources
developed and sold by Boulder Real Time Technologies (BRTT -
www.brtt.com) has been made accessible through two new drivers in
SRB. The first resource is an Object Ring Buffer called the Antelope
Real Time System (ARTS). The second resource is a relational database
called Antelope Seismic Information System (ASIS) (also known as
Datascope). Antelope provides a set of software modules that
implement acquisition, transport, buffering, processing, archiving and
distribution of environmental monitoring information. When
integrating with SRB, we laid over the stream-flow paradigm of the
real-time system with the file system paradigm of SRB. Because of
this, a user can register a data stream as an SRB object, open it and
read packets of data and close the stream. because of the way ARTS is
implemented more than one user can open a stream and read the
packets. SRB takes full advantage of this facility. Moreover, one can
define user-defined metadata and extensible metadata for these streams
in the MCAT catalog (as well as system metadata in Datascope database)
and discover the streams that are available through the SRB.
3) MDSPlus interface to SRB. MDSPlus (www.mdsplus.org) is a data
handling system used in the Fusion community. MDSPlus clients can
link with an interface library (in the unixIO subdirectory) and the
SRB client-only libraries, and then access (open, read, write, close,
etc) data on an SRB Server. As of SRB 3.3, all functions needed by
MDSPlus are implemented, including a partial file lock.
Bug fixes and enhancements:
1) A critical bug was fixed that caused Sput of a file larger than 2
GB to fail. This is the same bug fix given in the 3.3 patch.
2) A new readme file was added - advancedScommand.primer to explain
some of the more advanced Scommands.
3) HPSS v 5.1 support was added.
4) The way the server configures the MCAT host was changed so that it
will use the host configured in the data/mcatHost file instead of the
one in MCAT zone table. This will make it easier to move the
MCAT-enabled server to another host. (The previous method was to use
the mcatHost information and then override it with the Zone
information from the MCAT, which is fine when they match.)
5) A -s option was added to Schksum to provide a quick check of data
integrity based on file size. For each file being checked, the server
will compare the actual physical file size with the size registered in
MCAT.
6) Fixes were made to get phyMove, bulk phyMove and bulk get of
compound objects (objects on compound resources) to work properly.
Previously, it would return an error message.
7) Bulk Sput into container was added. "Sput -bc cont" now works.
Sbload can now be deprecated.
8) The ADS (UK eScience's archival system) driver was modified so that
it will do only sequential I/O. Previously, the server supporting an
ADS resource had to be built for sequential I/O, which is error prone
and limiting.
9) Several compile errors under various conditions were fixed:
. AIX platform
. Older versions of Linux compiler
. running "configure --enable-secure-comm"
. a few // comments were removed as needed for some compilers
. some changes were made to avoid some needless errors from gmake
10) Misc bug fixes - Segmentation fault in SgetR; parallel "Sput -a"
11) A bug in the ticket-based access for accesing files using a
collection ticket with recursion has been removed. The bug caused an
error when accessing files in lower levels of the collections. One can
now access files at any level using such a ticket using MySRB or
Scommands.
12) Some bugs in Squery and SmodE have been removed which were causing
some of the options to fail.
13) Extensible Metadata Ingestion, Deletion, Modify and Query
Functionalities have been added to MySRB.
14) A problem when linking with GSI 3.2.1 has been fixed; it now
properly locates the callout library to avoid some missing externals
(bug 84).
15) A workaround has been developed for a intermittent bulk load
problem for the MAC OSX OS. We were seeing an occasional buffer
corruption problem when running bulk upload using multiple
threads. This problem is only seen using the MAC OSX OS when multiple
threads were used. The multi-threads mode has now been switched off
for the MAC OS as a workaround which would result in a somewhat slower
but not significantly slower bulk load operation. (bug 72)
16) Java Admin Tool (mcatAdmin.jar):
a) deleteUser has been fixed; it now removes various user
directories (if empty) before attempting to remove user.
b) the connect host is now displayed in the title bar and the
program exits when the X box is clicked (these provided by Nigel
Sim; thanks!)
17) Many extensions were made to the autotest.sh script: more tests,
more configurations, and more platforms. This is used internally, in
various tests, during development and before each release and has
helped us find and correct a number of bugs.
18) install.pl has been updated with many additional checks and
features to eliminate problems in various platform environments.
The following Bugzilla bugs/features have been resolved since the
previous release. Some of these are described above. See bugzilla
for more information:
ID State Result Summary
58 RESO INVA a problem with the function srbFile.copyTo
64 RESO FIXE Sput -b stops after 1001 file transfer
71 RESO WONT --enable-openssl-location configure option doesn't work
74 RESO FIXE html man pages have bad html links to other Sman pages
82 RESO FIXE SRB_SECURE_COMM fails to build in 3.3 release
84 RESO FIXE Missing library references when using GT 3.2.1 GSI
87 RESO FIXE autotest.sh test failure on login-linux (malloc/free)
90 RESO FIXE Sput of File larger than 2 gb gets bogus error return
92 RESO FIXE Broken link in web documentation
93 RESO FIXE Broken links to installation scripts
94 RESO FIXE The deleteValue and changeValue utilities require the
string "Yes" for confirmation
97 RESO FIXE Java Admin cannot delete users
100 RESO FIXE isUserSysAdmin call returns wrong answer in some cases
104 RESO FIXE Sphymove -bc fails on AIX
107 RESO FIXE Sufmeta -R -c option returns COLECTION_NOT_IN_CAT
111 RESO FIXE After a while, SRBServers fail trying to open mcatHost