Call for Community Testing: 3.9.4 Reliable File Transfer (RFT) Service

What is a "Call for Community Testing"?

A Call for Community Testing is a mechanism to notify our users that new Globus code is available for testing in the field. Through these calls, the Globus Alliance hopes to expose its code to a wide variety of usage scenarios early in its development process. The ultimate goals are to catch bugs that have historically been found only after final releases, and to elicit feedback from the community on ways our software can be improved.

Participating in the RFT Testing Call is easy!

  1. Optional: Consider sending mail to [email protected] to let us know that you're helping out and describing what you intend to test.
  2. Install the software in a non-production environment. Use the 3.9.5 distribution from http://www-unix.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/development/; the code can also be retrieved directly from CVS from the trunk.
  3. Exercise the software.
  4. Log your experiences in http://bugzilla.globus.org/globus/ under the "RFT" product. Please mention 3.9.5 explicitly in the body of the report.
  5. Optional: Consider sending descriptions of your tests to [email protected] so that we might use them to build standard tests in the future.
  6. If you have any questions or comments about the process, send an email to [email protected].
  7. If you have any questions or comments regarding this component, join the gt4-friends list to participate in discussions with other testers. (To subscribe, send an email to [email protected] containing the words "subscribe gt4-friends" in the message body.)

Testing period

The testing period for this call is December 17 - January 31 2005.

About RFT

RFT Service implementation in 3.9.5 uses standard SOAP messages over HTTP to submit and manage a set of 3rd party GridFTP transfers and to delete files using GridFTP. The user creates a RFT resource by submitting a list of URL pairs of  files that need to be transferred/deleted  to RFT Factory service. The user also specifies the time to live for the resource the user is creating to a GT 3.9.5 Container in which RFT is deployed and configured. The resource is created after the user is properly authorized and authenticated. RFT service implementation exposes operations to control and manage the transfers (the resource). The operations exposed by both RFT factory and RFT service are briefly described below. The resource the user created also exposes the state of the transfer as a resource property to which the user can either subscribe for changes or poll for the changes in state periodically using standard command line clients.

Reasons for testing RFT

We need volunteers to stress test RFT to make it more scalable, robust.

Technology dependencies

RFT depends on WS-Core, WS-Delegation Service

Environment/build parameters and other special conditions to test

  1. Submit a transfer request with lot of files ( > 1000).
  2. Submit a directory with lot of files in it.