Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of owen maroney said:
> I am somewhat alarmed by this statement. Up until now I have
> understood
> that, while it is required that sites support gsiftp, rfio
> was optional.
It's optional in the sense that it isn't widely used by applications
except for access to castor. Actually the vast majority of sites have
deployed it, in both EDG and LCG, and it has always been a supported
protocol. As things stand it's the only way to get posix-like access to
files, which experiments always claimed was a high priority, but which
doesn't seem to get used in practice.
> My concern is if new datamanagement code has been written *presuming*
> rfio is available, then will these sites now be *forced* to
> install rfio?
No-one is ever forced to install anything ...
> And so a previously optional protocol becomes mandatory... when was
> this discussed/decided?
As you well know, virtually nothing is ever discussed or decided in a
public way! A lot of the new LCG software (DPM, GFAL, LFC) has been
written by Jean-Philippe Baud and hence has re-used the castor
code-base, including rfio. That's not to say that the security hasn't
been improved, I hope it has, but I can't say anything definite because
there's hardly any documentation. In any case, since LCG always
maintains that it doesn't do any development there is no mechanism to
review the development it does ...
Stephen
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