Bundle Installation on CentOS

perfSONAR combines various sets of measurement tools and services. Commonly people install the entire set of tools using the Toolkit ISO (as detailed at Getting the Software) but this may not be optimal for every situation. For example if you only need a subset of the tools, you have an existing CentOS system on which you’d like to install the software and/or you are doing a large deployment of perfSONAR nodes. With this in mind RPMs are available that install the bundles described in perfSONAR Installation Options. The steps in the remaining sections of this document detail the steps required for installing these bundles.

System Requirements

  • Operating System:
    • Any system running CentOS 7. perfSONAR 4.X toolkit ISOs are only available as CentOS 7. CentOS 7 drops support for i386/i686 architectures, so there are only x86_64 versions of the CentOS 7 perfSONAR packages available.
    • We still offer packages support for any system running either a 32-bit or 64-bit CentOS 6. Existing CentOS 6 users will be able to auto-update.
    • Other RedHat-based operating systems may work, but are not officially supported at this time.
  • See Hardware Requirements for hardware requirements and more.

Note

Installing a graphical/desktop environment with perfSONAR is not supported. These environments generally come with a Network Manager that conflicts with the way that perfSONAR is tuning the network interface parameters. We recommend doing only server grade OS installs.

Installation

Step 1: Configure Yum

The process configures yum to point at the necessary repositories to get packages needed for perfSONAR. You will need to follow the steps below as privileged user:

  1. Install the EPEL RPM:

    CentOS 6:

    rpm -hUv https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm

    CentOS 7:

    rpm -hUv https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

  2. Install the Internet2-repo RPM:

    CentOS 6:

    rpm -hUv http://software.internet2.edu/rpms/el6/x86_64/main/RPMS/Internet2-repo-0.6-1.noarch.rpm

    CentOS 7:

    rpm -hUv http://software.internet2.edu/rpms/el7/x86_64/main/RPMS/Internet2-repo-0.7-1.noarch.rpm

  3. Refresh yum’s cache so it detects the new RPMS:

    yum clean all

Step 2: Install a Bundle

Choose one of the following bundles and see perfSONAR Installation Options page for more information about what these bundles are.

  • perfSONAR Test Point:

    yum install perfsonar-testpoint

    Additionally, you may also install the Toolkit service-watcher, ntp, security (firewall rules) and sysctl packages.

    Optional Packages

    To install additional packages, run:

    /usr/lib/perfsonar/scripts/install-optional-packages.py

    Or, you can manually install them to your liking by running:

    • yum install perfsonar-toolkit-servicewatcher
    • yum install perfsonar-toolkit-ntp
    • yum install perfsonar-toolkit-security
    • yum install perfsonar-toolkit-sysctl

    In particular, you should install perfsonar-toolkit-ntp if you are not managing your ntp.conf file in some other manner.

  • perfSONAR Core:

    yum install perfsonar-core

    Just as in TestPoint Bundle, optional packages are available and can be installed via a script or manually.

    Optional Packages

    To install additional packages, run:

    /usr/lib/perfsonar/scripts/install-optional-packages.py

    Or, you can manually install them to your liking by running:

    • yum install perfsonar-toolkit-servicewatcher
    • yum install perfsonar-toolkit-ntp
    • yum install perfsonar-toolkit-security
    • yum install perfsonar-toolkit-sysctl

  • perfSONAR Central Management:

    yum install perfsonar-centralmanagement

    The Central Management bundle might be installed alongside another bundle.

  • perfSONAR Toolkit:

    yum install perfsonar-toolkit

Step 3: Verify NTP and Tuning Parameters

Step 3 can be ignored for perfsonar-toolkit package installation as its instructions are included and run automatically

  • NTP Tuning

    • Auto-select NTP servers based on proximity

      The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is required by the tools in order to obtain accurate measurements. Some of the tools such as BWCTL/pscheduler will not even run unless NTP is configured. If an optional package was installed, then run:

      /usr/lib/perfsonar/scripts/configure_ntpd new

      For CentOS6:

      service ntpd restart

      For CentOS7:

      systemctl restart ntpd

    You can verify if NTP is running with the following command:

    /usr/sbin/ntpq -p

  • System Tuning

    It is important to make sure that your host is properly tuned for maximum TCP performance on the WAN. You should verify that htcp, not reno, is the default TCP congestion control algorithm, and that the maximum TCP buffers are big enough for your paths of interest.

    • Configure perfSONAR sysctl settings

      If the optional package was installed, then run:

      /usr/lib/perfsonar/scripts/configure_sysctl

    • Advanced Manual Tuning

      For more information please refer to http://fasterdata.es.net/host-tuning/linux/

Step 4: Firewall and Security Considerations

Package Install

If you have installed the perfsonar-toolkit-security package, then you can configure the firewalld / IPTable entries by running:

/usr/lib/perfsonar/scripts/configure_firewall

The package also installs fail2ban.

Or, if you would like to configure the rules manually, then please review the document here on the ports that need to be open.

Additionally, bwctl and pscheduler allow you to limit the parameters of tests such as duration and bandwidth based on the requesters IP address. It does this through the files bwctl-server.limits and pscheduler/limits.conf. ESnet provides a file containing all R&E subnets, which is updated nightly. Instructions on how to download this file and configure pScheduler and bwctl to use it are described on the page Limiting Tests to R&E Networks Only.

Note that the perfsonar-toolkit-security package is automatically included in the perfsonar-toolkit bundle.

Step 5: Auto updates

You can also enable yum ‘auto updates’ to ensure you always have the most current and hopefully most secure packages. To do this follow the steps in Managing Automatic Updates from the Command-Line.

Note

Automatic updates are enabled by default in the perfSONAR Toolkit.

Step 6: Service Watcher

The perfsonar-toolkit-servicewatcher installs scripts that check if bwctl, pscheduler, owamp, databases and other processes are running and restarts if they have stopped unexpectedly.

The install automatically configures cron to run the service_watcher regularly.

To run the script manually, run:

/usr/lib/perfsonar/scripts/service_watcher

Step 7: Register your services

Note: this step can be done through the web interface if the perfsonar-toolkit bundle (or the ISO) was installed. See Updating Administrative Information.

In order to publish the existence of your measurement services there is a single file you need to edit with some details about your host. You may populate this information by opening /etc/perfsonar/lsregistrationdaemon.conf. You will see numerous properties you may populate. They are commented out meaning you need to remove the # at the beginning of the line for them to take effect. The properties you are required to set are as follows:

##Hostname or IP address others can use to access your service
#external_address   myhost.mydomain.example

##Primary interface on host
#external_address_if_name eth0

and the other entries (administrator_email, site_name, city, country, latitude, longitude, etc.) are highly recommended.

In the example above remove the leading # before external_address and external_address_if_name respectively. Also replace myhost.mydomain.example and eth0 with the values relevant to your host. There are additional fields available for you to set. None of them are required but it is highly recommended you set as many as possible since it will make finding your services easier for others. More information on the available fields can be found in the configuration file provided by the RPM install.

Step 8: Starting your services

You can start all the services by rebooting the host since all are configured to run by default. In order to check services status issue the following commands:

For CentOS6:

service pscheduler-scheduler status
service owamp-server status
service bwctl-server status
service perfsonar-lsregistrationdaemon status

For CentOS7:

systemctl status pscheduler-scheduler.service
systemctl status owamp-server.service
systemctl status bwctl-server
systemctl status perfsonar-lsregistrationdaemon.service

If they are not running you may start them with appropriate init commands as a root user. For example:

For CentOS6:

/etc/init.d/owamp-server start
/etc/init.d/bwctl-server start
service perfsonar-lsregistrationdaemon start

For CentOS7:

/etc/init.d/owamp-server start
/etc/init.d/bwctl-server start
systemctl start perfsonar-lsregistrationdaemon

Note that you may have to wait a few hours for NTP to synchronize your clock before starting bwctl-server and owamp-server.

Configuring Central Management

If your node is part of a measurement mesh and you installed perfsonar-centralmanagement bundle refer to the documentation here: Central Configuration Overview

Configuring perfSONAR through the web interface

If you installed the perfsonar-toolkit or perfsonar-centralmanagement bundle on an existing CentOS host, you’ll probably need to disable SELinux to gain access to the web interface. This is done with the following commands:

echo 0 >/selinux/enforce
sed -i 's/^SELINUX=enforcing/SELINUX=permissive/' /etc/selinux/config

After that, you can refer to the general perfSONAR configuration from Configuring the Toolkit for the First Time.