[AG-TECH] AG2.0 RC1 Installation

Ivan R. Judson judson at mcs.anl.gov
Fri May 23 06:21:48 CDT 2003


 
Hi Stephen,
 
This is an exellent report. The questions I can answer I have answered
below; I'll let others chime in to answer the rest. This is also great
feedback on the installation process and what information you needed to get
through it.  We'll work on making it simpler this week!

Installed v2.0 RC1 yesterday on a mixed/multi-machine AG Node (RH7.3 &
Win2k). 

Used information from the following documents as a guide: 
http://scv.bu.edu/~jtvh/AGTk2/rc1.txt
http://hpcnc.cpe.ku.ac.th/moin/InstallingAccessGrid 
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/web-mail-archive/lists/ag-tech/2003/05/msg00097.
html 

Had the problem mentioned earlier today where I could not switch rooms in
TVS and attributed it to something I did (nothing ever works the first time
- right?). It was getting late so I decided to troubleshoot later. Hopefully
the rebooting of TVS cleared my problems.

Anyway here are some comments/questions that maybe someone can shed some
light on and/or might be helpful to others... 

0). I believe I saw somewhere that RH7.3 was supported/tested, etc for
v2.0RC1. However I had problems trying to install the prerequisite version
of the Python2 RPM linked to from the AG2.0 website. This version indicated
it was for RH8.0 and when trying to install it indicated a dependancy on
libc.so.6  (glibc3.2) and libdb.4.0 (Berkley DB support?). Since I verified
that I already had a version of Python2 loaded, and libc.so.6 was linked
somewhere, I skipped installing this version with the thinking that updating
gcc, glibc at this time was not a good idea. Is the version of Python2
important?

This is something we need to clarify. On RH7.3 Python 2.2. is already
installed, so you need not install a new python. 

 1). Had a problem with the order of installation of the AG rpms on the
Audio & Video machines. Received an error installing
AccessGrid-2.0RC-1.i386.rpm (something about processing the $pre
commands/section - not exactly sure since I do not have my notes), however
trying to install the respective services (Audio/rat or VideoProducer/vic)
did not work since there appeared to be a dependency on the
AccessGrid-2.0RC-1 rpm. Putting all packages on the same rpm install command
line allowed the respective services (Audio/rat or VideoProducer/vic) to
install, however the AccessGrid-2.0RC-1 section still produced that $pre
error mentioned earlier, however I could now issue the command to install
just the AccessGrid-2.0RC-1 rpm.

I'll let Tom Uram or Ti Leggett answer these questions; they are more
familiar with the details of the Linux install process. 

 2). I generated the globus key/cert request on just one machine. When I
received my cert back I then copied this (and the corresponding key) to the
appropriate directories on all nodes. Not sure if this is good form, but it
seemed to work. (Grid proxy init did not give any errors). 

The process of requesting certs should get only easier (it's hard to go down
from the bottom), we're working on software that should make this
significantly more clear. Until that comes this little bit might help:

In AG2.0, the certificates we focus on are identity certificates. These are
designed to identify an individual. Therefore, you should be able to get
your identity certificate anywhere and as long as you keep your usercert.pem
safe you should be able to use that on all the machines. You have to copy it
to all the machines you want to use that certificate on if you don't have a
shared home file system, which is a bit tedious.

Later we'll talk about other certificate types, service and host, and how
they can alleviate some of these issues.

3). I do not have all my notes in front of me, but if I recall correctly,
the response I received from the proxy init indicated that it was valid for
only a short period of time. Is this normal? How often must the proxy be
updated  ? 

The default is 8 hours. On Linux this can be changed with the -h (hours)
argument, wgpi.exe has an entry for changing the number of hours in the UI.
I believe we are now building and shipping grid-proxy-init.exe for windows
and trying to move away from the wgpi.exe tool. In fact, in the latest code
if your proxy isn't valid a dialog pops up that shows your DN, asks for your
passphrase, and lets you input the number of hours you want your proxy valid
for. 

4). A message is generated on the Audio & Display machines when running
AGServiceManager about looking for/needing to run SetupVideo.py.  I did not
install the VideoProducer on these nodes, so I don't think this file is
present. Do I need to be concerned? Can I configure the ServiceManager to
not look for SetupVideo.py on the Audio & Display machines? 

Tom Uram can answer this question. 

5). My (and other) video streams did show up in the TVS lobby after starting
the VenueClient  : )  and each of my video streams showed the configured
label of Audience, Main, Presenter, etc.; however they all appeared to be
coming from ag at xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (video capture machine IP address). How do I
configure the different streams to show my institution name instead of the
IP address? 

Again, Tom Uram :-). 

6). Finally, something that's been bugging me in v1.x & now 2.0. How can I
scroll through all received streams in a venue on the display machine? I
know to use the number key to change the number of streams horizontally, but
how do I scroll/display them in the vertical direction? 

This is a characteristic of the tool we're using. It doesn't have this
feature. We'll be working on building some  alternative tools (and working
with others to have them build some) to allow a wider range of solutions,
but specifically if we use OpenMash's vic tool it does a couple of things
nicely, first it has a 's' command key that turns on scroll bars in the
thumbnail view (yay), and it also has automatic detection of blue/black
video streams and the option of not displaying them. Further, it has the
ability to have the autoplacement of video streams be programmatically
modified (using tcl --ick). However, the biggest drawback is that it doesn't
have autoplacement working the way our vic does yet.

I hope this helps. 

Thanks!

 

--Ivan

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/ag-tech/attachments/20030523/1e41a0ed/attachment.htm>


More information about the ag-tech mailing list