January 26, 2011

The pod-info command got revamped

Anar here...

Many of PoD customers like to use the pod-info command, to get a PROOF connection string, for example. You can also use it to get other different kinds of information. But the command had on big disadvantage - it could only be used on a machine where a PoD server is running. Crap! Isn't it?! :)
Users want to start a PoD server on one machine, but process an analysis and connect to a master from another, from a laptop for example.

A laptop is a perfect PROOF user interface, but a bad PROOF master, when we talk about hundreds of workers. You need good machines for PoD servers, since a PROOF master runs there.
Exactly in this direction PoD is developing.
My target is to have PoD user interfaces completely separated, if I want it, from PoD servers. So that I can start/stop/submit PoD jobs and completely control my PoD server from a user interface, probably a remote machine and behind a firewall.

Well I am glad to introduce a revised version of pod-info. This is another step in direction of disentangling of PoD UI and PoD Server. The new pod-info command addressed many issues including the one I described above.

The new pod-info is re-written from scratch and now acts as a client to pod-agent (server), which makes it a lot more accurate, powerful and, especially, more flexible in compare to the old command.


By default pod-info tries now to find and connect to a local PoD server. A PoD server considered to be a local one if the pod-info and the PoD server run under the same user id. It could be the same machine or different machines but with a shared home file system.

When you want to retrieve information about a remote PoD server, than you need to use the --ssh option. Using this option you can specify an ssh connection string, where a remote PoD server is running. The pod-info command will first try to find the running PoD server on that host and than process user requests on that server.

Interested? Want to try the new command?
if YES, than
check the User's Manual of the current Nightly build for more information.
and get the latest PoD nightly build, which is shipped with the new command.

You could really help to improve the product if you could test it in your environment and with your use cases.
Please use our issue tracker to report bugs or feature requests.

January 13, 2011

PoD 3.1.3

Anar here...

While working on a new PoD version I noticed an unpleasant bug, which was introduced with some new stuff in PoD 3.1. I decided to fixe it not only in the PoD master branch, but also back-port fixes to PoD 3.1.

The bug is not critical, but I would strongly recommend all PoD users, who use PoD 3.1 to upgrade to PoD 3.1.3, which has been just released. Otherwise in some cases PoD could leave xproof processes behind and slowly pollute user's environment with unwanted daemons.

Some details about the bug can be found here and here.

I am very sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

PoD is being constantly tested in different environments and as soon as a critical bug found a patch will be immediately released.

If you found a bug or have a feature request, please use our new issue tracker to report.

January 7, 2011

PoD 3.1

Finally a new PoD stable version is ready for consumption.

PoD version 3.1 has now been released.

Those who have been following PoD development know, that a shared installation feature and a Condor plug-in are the main topics of this release.

The Condor plug-in has just joined a long list of supported job managers' plug-ins.
PoD is now shipped with SSH, gLiteLSFPBSPro/OpenPBS/Torque, Grid Engine and Condor plug-ins.

Highlights of this release
  • PoD now supports Condor and is shipped with the Condor plug-in.
  • Now PoD supports shared installations.
  • PoD server and PoD worker instances clean now precisely only own processes. It makes it possible to start several different PoD workers/servers sessions under the same user ID (this is important for an AliEn integration).
  • The PoD server starter script is a factor of 3 faster now.
  • Improved idle time-out handling in PoD servers.
  • Updated User's Manual.
  • Many minor bugfixes and further improvements were made.