Dear all,

Following recent reports of issues with Globus and EMI, I'm sending you a summary of the situation.

The short story is as follows:

The issue is due to an update release of globus-gridftp-server-devel made by IGE on Feb 20th that breaks the published interface. The affected EMI components are DPM-DSI and StoRM-GridFTP-Server. The issue only affects system having the autoupdate feature on or new installations of DPM or StoRM made between Feb 20th and Feb 29th. This should represent a very small fraction of the sites. So far problems have been reported by two sites and in both cases not in production systems. Both the EMI and UMD repository are currently protected against this Globus update. The issue has been escalated to IGE to provide a fix as soon as possible. In addition, both the DPM and StoRM teams are working on a fix to use the new interface.

The detailed history is as follows:

- On Feb 2nd the planned release of the Globus Toolkit 5.2 update is reported to the EMI EMT list. The update is described by the Globus developers as backward compatible.

- On Feb 6th, as per EMI procedures, the EMI release manager requires product teams with products that have dependencies to test the Globus update. No problems are reported by the EMI PTs at this point. The reason for the failure of detecting the problem is being investigated, but it may be due to the fact that the tests were done rebuilding the EMI services with the new Globus library before trying them.

- On Feb 20th Globus 5.2 is released in EPEL. On the same day the operations manager of NGI Finland reports that the update of Globus packages breaks DPM functionality and the same problem is reported to affect StoRM at QMUL. In both cases the problem affected non-production systems, which were not using the recommended repository configuration.

- As soon as the exact cause of the problem was understood, the EMI and UMD repositories were protected against the Globus update and both installations and upgrades from either repository should now work as expected, as long as the recommended repository configurations are used.

- The issue is being escalated to the IGE project asking for a fix of Globus, however there are doubts that this will happen soon or ever. Despite this legitimate expectation, the DPM and Storm developers have therefore started working on a fix to be released at the very latest on March 15th, probably sooner.

I will keep you informed of any evolution of this situation.

Regards,

Alberto