Welcome to CernVM-FS’s documentation!¶

What is CernVM-FS?¶

The CernVM-File System (CernVM-FS) provides a scalable, reliable and low- maintenance software distribution service. It was developed to assist High Energy Physics (HEP) collaborations to deploy software on the worldwide- distributed computing infrastructure used to run data processing applications. CernVM-FS is implemented as a POSIX read-only file system in user space (a FUSE module). Files and directories are hosted on standard web servers and mounted in the universal namespace /cvmfs. Internally, CernVM-FS uses content-addressable storage and Merkle trees in order to maintain file data and meta-data. CernVM-FS uses outgoing HTTP connections only, thereby it avoids most of the firewall issues of other network file systems. It transfers data and meta-data on demand and verifies data integrity by cryptographic hashes.

By means of aggressive caching and reduction of latency, CernVM-FS focuses specifically on the software use case. Software usually comprises many small files that are frequently opened and read as a whole. Furthermore, the software use case includes frequent look-ups for files in multiple directories when search paths are examined.

CernVM-FS is actively used by small and large HEP collaborations. In many cases, it replaces package managers and shared software areas on cluster file systems as means to distribute the software used to process experiment data.

Contents¶

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.4.4¶

CernVM-FS 2.4.4 is a patch release. It contains an important fix for a bug with certain server configurations that was introduced with version 2.4.1. Linux clients do not necessarily need to upgrade.

As with previous releases, upgrading clients should be seamless just by installing the new package from the repository. As usual, we recommend to update only a few worker nodes first and gradually ramp up once the new version proves to work correctly. Please take special care when upgrading a cvmfs client in NFS mode.

For Stratum 1 servers, there should be no running snapshots during the upgrade. For Release Manager Machines, all transactions must be closed before upgrading.

Note for upgrades from versions prior to 2.4.3: please also see the specific instructions in the release notes for version 2.4.3 and earlier.

Bug Fixes and Improvements¶

Server: fix registration of chunk hashes without bulk hash and non-SHA1 hash algorithm (CVM-1446)

Server: have geoapi try $REMOTE_ADDR if $HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR has no geoinfo (CVM-1442)

Client: react to a change of DNS server on macOS (CVM-496)

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.4.3¶

CernVM-FS 2.4.3 is a patch release. It contains bugfixes and adjustments for the client. Release manager machines and stratum 1 servers do not necessarily need to upgrade.

As with previous releases, upgrading clients should be seamless just by installing the new package from the repository. As usual, we recommend to update only a few worker nodes first and gradually ramp up once the new version proves to work correctly. Please take special care when upgrading a cvmfs client in NFS mode.

For Stratum 1 servers, there should be no running snapshots during the upgrade. For Release Manager Machines, all transactions must be closed before upgrading.

Note for upgrades from versions prior to 2.4.2: please also see the specific instructions in the release notes for version 2.4.2 and earlier.

Bug Fixes and Improvements¶

Client: fix potential corruption of /etc/mtab during client crash handling (CVM-1431)

Client: fix silent drop of mount points on top of CernVM-FS volumes, introduced with 2.4.1 (CVM-1423)

Client: workaround for alien cache located on BeeGFS (CVM-1403)

Client: fix throughput reporting in cvmfs_config stat (CVM-1432)

Client: fix locating cached manifest for some tiered cache manager configurations (CVM-1436)

Client: lower requirement on selinux-policy version on EL7 (CVM-1422)

Client: enable multiple cvmfs-config* packages to be installable on Debian (CVM-1420)

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.4.2¶

CernVM-FS 2.4.2 is a patch release. It contains bugfixes and adjustments for stratum 0 and stratum 1 operations as well as for client-side cache plugins. Clients not using the new cache plugins do not necessarily need to upgrade.

As with previous releases, upgrading clients should be seamless just by installing the new package from the repository. As usual, we recommend to update only a few worker nodes first and gradually ramp up once the new version proves to work correctly. Please take special care when upgrading a cvmfs client in NFS mode.

For Stratum 1 servers, there should be no running snapshots during the upgrade. Note: if the configuration of the Stratum 1 server is handled by a configuration management system (Puppet, Chef, …), please see Section Manual Migration from 2.4.1 Stratum 1 Web Servers.

For Release Manager Machines, all transactions must be closed before upgrading.

Note for upgrades from versions prior to 2.4.1: please also see the specific instructions in the release notes for version 2.4.1 and earlier.

Bug Fixes and Improvements¶

Client: fix use of cached file catalog in cache plugins

Client: add cvmcache_get_session() to cache plugin API (CVM-1368)

Client: improve logging for cache plugins

Server: skip external files during garbage collection (CVM-1396)

Server: prevent diff viewer from recursing into hidden directories (CVM-1384)

Server: fix variant symlink display on release manager machine (CVM-1383)

Server: fix off-by-one error for chunk size when grafting files

Server: cache GeoAPI replies for 5 minutes, improve WSGI config (CVM-1349)

Server: enforce explicit catalog TTL setting on publish (CVM-1388)

Server: prevent overlayfs repositories on XFS ftype=0 spool directories (CVM-1385)

Server: enforce numeric value when manually setting revision number (CVM-1372)

Manual Migration from 2.4.1 Stratum 1 Web Servers¶

If you are not using cvmfs_server migrate to automatically upgrade, web servers serving Stratum 1 repositories can be migrated from version 2.4.1 with the following steps:

Ensure that there are is no active replication or garbage collection process before updating the server software and during the repository layout migration.

Install the cvmfs-server 2.4.2 package.

The Apache configuration for stratum 1 repositories should be adjusted as follows:

Remove the WSGI configuration, the Alias /cvmfs/$name/api, and the <Directory /var/www/wsgi-scripts> directives from the repository-specific configuration

Add a new Apache configuration file named cvmfs.+webapi.conf (sic, to make sure this file is alphabetically before the other configuration files) with the following content

AliasMatch ^/cvmfs/([^/]+)/api/(.*)\$ /var/www/wsgi-scripts/cvmfs-server/cvmfs-api.wsgi/\$1/\$2
WSGIDaemonProcess cvmfsapi threads=64 display-name=%{GROUP} \
  python-path=/usr/share/cvmfs-server/webapi
<Directory /var/www/wsgi-scripts/cvmfs-server>
  WSGIProcessGroup cvmfsapi
  WSGIApplicationGroup cvmfsapi
  Options ExecCGI
  SetHandler wsgi-script
  # On Apache 2.4: replace the next two lines by
  # Require all granted
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>
WSGISocketPrefix /var/run/wsgi

As a last step, update /etc/cvmfs/repositories.d/<REPOSITORY>/server.conf and set CVMFS_CREATOR_VERSION=138

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.4.1¶

CernVM-FS 2.4 is a feature release that comes with performance improvements, new functionality, and bugfixes. We would like to thank Brian Bockelman (U. Nebraska), Dave Dykstra (FNAL), and Tom Downes (U. Wisconsin) for their contributions to this release!

There are several substantial improvements in this release, which are further described below.

A plugin interface for the client cache together with an in-memory plugin

A built-in tiered cache manager

Instant access to named snapshots through the hidden .cvmfs/snapshots directory

Support for branching and diffing in CernVM-FS’ internal versioning

Faster propagation of repository updates

Support for Yubikey 4 & NEO for signing CernVM-FS repository

Improved apt repository structure for Debian/Ubuntu packages

New platforms: Fedora 25 and 26 on x86_64, Debian 8 and 9, gcc >= 6, OpenSSL >= 1.1

As with previous releases, upgrading should be seamless just by installing the new package from the repository. As usual, we recommend to update only a few worker nodes first and gradually ramp up once the new version proves to work correctly. Please take special care when upgrading a client in NFS mode.

For Stratum 0 servers, all transactions must be closed before upgrading. After the software upgrade, the directory layout on the release manager needs to be adjusted by a call to cvmfs_server migrate for each repository.

For Stratum 1 server, there should be no running snapshots during the upgrade.

Note: if the configuration of the Stratum 0/1 server is handled by a configuration management system (Puppet, Chef, …), please see Section Manual Migration from 2.3.5 Release Manager Machines and Stratum 0/1 Web Servers.

Note: on Debian/Ubuntu platforms, please read Section New apt Repositories regarding hotpatching the client.

Cache Plugins¶

Every CernVM-FS client is configured to use a directory as local cache of data and meta-data. Instead of this directory, the task of maintaining a local cache can optionally be performed by an external process, a “CernVM-FS Cache Plugin” (CVM-1054). This allows for special-purpose cache managers in non-standard deployments, for instance on supercomputers. Cache plugins can be developed and deployed independently from the CernVM-FS client itself. CernVM-FS 2.4 provides one such plugin, an in-memory cache that uses a fixed amount of RAM as a cache (CVM-1044).

See Section Advanced Cache Configuration for configuration and use of cache plugins and Section Cache Plugins for an introduction on how to write cache plugins.

Tiered Cache¶

Together with support for cache plugins, there is now support for a multi-tier client cache (CVM-1050, CVM-1183). A tiered cache can combine two other caches and organize them as an upper cache layer and a lower cache layer. Data is first searched for in the upper layer. Upon an upper layer cache miss, data is copied from the lower layer into the upper layer. Tiered caches can be used to combine a small cache on fast storage (e.g. SSD, memory) with a large cache on slower storage (e.g. HDD, network drive).

See Section Advanced Cache Configuration for configuration and use of a tiered cache.

Instant Access to Named Snapshots¶

A new server parameter, CVMFS_VIRTUAL_DIR=[true,false], can be used to control the existance of the hidden top-level directory .cvmfs/snapshots in a repository (CVM-1062). If enabled, the file system state referred to by the named tags can be browsed through .cvmfs/snapshots/$tagname. This feature requires a CernVM-FS 2.4 client, older clients show an empty .cvmfs/snapshots directory.

See Section Instant Access to Named Snapshots for further information.

Branching¶

The new cvmfs_server checkout command can be used to branch off a certain named snapshot in order to publish a fix for a previous repository state (CVM-1197). This feature makes most sense for repositories that use the instant snapshot access (see above).

See Section Branching for further information.

Snapshot Diffs¶

The new cvmfs_server diff command can be used to show the difference set between any two snapshots (CVM-1170). See Section Named Snapshot Diffs for further information.

Faster Propagation of Repository Updates¶

Several improvements have been made to reduce the time to propagate changes from the release manager machine to clients.

The default repository time-to-live is reduced from 15 minutes to 4 minutes (CVM-1336). Unless the CVMFS_REPOSITORY_TTL parameter is explicitly set, the first cvmfs_server publish command with version 2.4 reduces the time-to-live value. Thus clients are instructed to check every 4 minutes for repository updates.

On RHEL 7 and newer, clients can actively evict old entries from kernel buffers (CVM-1041). When clients see a new repository revision, they hence get rid of a 60 seconds delay to passively wait for local kernel buffers to expire.

The new server parameter CVMFS_GENERATE_LEGACY_BULK_CHUNKS=no can be used to omit creation of unchunked objects for large files (CVM-640). This is most interesting for repositories hosting many files that are larger than 4MB. For those repositories, the speed of the publication process is improved by more than a factor of two. This setting requires clients newer than version 2.1.7. Note for garbage collected repositories: Besides the release manager machine, all stratum 1s need to run version 2.4, too. Otherwise they will delete the chunks of files with no bulk hash during garbage collection.

Yubikey Support¶

This release supports maintaining the repository master key on a Yubikey smart card device (CVM-1259). If the masterkey is stored on such devices, it cannot be stolen even if the computer hosting the repositories is compromised.

See Section Master keys for further information.

New apt Repositories¶

Starting with this release, the apt repositories that provide deb packages for Ubuntu and Debian are restructured. So far, all Debian based platforms got packages built for Ubuntu 12.04. These packages are still used if the platform is not recognized by the cvmfs-release package. For Debian stable platforms and Ubuntu LTS releases, packages built for the specific platform are used instead.

For Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 8, the CernVM-FS apt repositories contain a fixed version of the autofs package which is necessary to support the CernVM-FS config repository.

Note on client hotpatching: packages from the new apt repository cannot seamlessly upgrade previous cvmfs clients. In order to upgrade the client, please

Run cvmfs_config umount to unmount all active repositories

Upgrade to the cvmfs-release 2.X package and run apt-get update

Update the cvmfs client package.

This is a one-time migration. The next CernVM-FS release will again upgrade seamlessly.

Bug Fixes¶

Client: fix small memory leak during remount of root catalog

Client: fix handling of file:// url in CVMFS_SERVER_URL

Client: fix cvmfs_config reload under root environment with dependencies into /cvmfs (CVM-1352)

Client: fix mount helper for very long lines in /etc/group (CVM-1304)

Client: fix mount helper if repository name resolves to local path (CVM-1106)

Client: fix shell errors when required config repo cannot be mounted (CVM-1300)

Client / macOS: fix cache size reporting in ‘df’ (CVM-1286)

Client / macOS: fix cvmfs_config reload

Client / X509 Auth: Use default X509_CERT_DIR also if it is empty string (CVM-1083)

Server: fix potential deadlock during catalog commit phase (CVM-1360)

Server: do not abort resiging on negative repository health check (CVM-1358)

Server: resolve SElinux conflict on port 8000 with soundd on RHEL 7 (CVM-1308)

Server / S3: fix authentication timeouts for large transactions on Ceph (CVM-1339)

Other Improvements¶

Client: allow for config repository on Ubuntu >= 16.04, Debian >= 8 (CVM-771)

Client: cache proxy settings in workspace directory (CVM-1156)

Client: improve stratum 1 geo sorting with active fallback proxy (CVM-769)

Client: add support for CVMFS_OOM_SCORE_ADJ to adjust the out-of-memory priority (CVM-1092)

Client: add support for revoking repository revisions up to a threshold in the blacklist (CVM-992)

Client: perform fail-over when whitelist or manifest is corrupted (CVM-837)

Client: add cvmfs_talk remount sync command

Cient: use cache for fetching history database on mount

Client: show all CVMFS_... parameters in cvmfs_config showconfig (CVM-1180)

Client: add cvmfs_config showconfig -s option to show only non-empty parameters

Client: add ncleanup24 xattr and Nagios check for cleanup rate (CVM-1097)

Client / macOS: use built-in LibreSSL on macOS (CVM-1112)

Server: add cvmfs_server gc -a option to garbage collect all applicable repositories (CVM-1095)

Server: make cvmfs_server catalog-chown command public (CVM-1077)

Server: add cvmfs_server resign -w for stand-alone whitelist resigning (CVM-1265)

Server: add cvmfs_server resign -p command to facilitate repository key rotation (CVM-1140)

Server: add cvmfs_server resign -d option to change whitelist expiration duration (CVM-1279)

Server: add cvmfs_server check -r command to repair reflog checksum (CVM-1240)

Server: allow ext3 as spool file system on RHEL 7.3 / overlayfs (CVM-1186)

Server: Optionally ignore special files with a warning on publish with CVMFS_IGNORE_SPECIAL_FILES (CVM-1106)

Server: increase maximum repostory name from ~30 chars to 60 chars (CVM-1173)

Server: trim trailing whitespaces from .cvmfsdirtab entries (CVM-1061)

Server / rsync: use rsync’s “perishable” feature instead of list-catalogs (CVM-1199)

Server: allow for Apache 2.4 style access controls on repositories (CVM-1255)

Server: add support for CVMFS_{ROOT|NESTED}_KCATALOG_LIMIT, CVMFS_FILE_MBYTE_LIMIT, CVMFS_ENFORCE_LIMITS to set publish limits (CVM-1094, CVM-1123)

Server: improve error reporting (CVM-1241, CVM-1246, CVM-1267,)

Manual Migration from 2.3.5 Release Manager Machines and Stratum 0/1 Web Servers¶

If you do not want to use cvmfs_server migrate to automatically upgrade, release manager machines that maintain Stratum 0 repositories as well as web servers serving stratum 0/1 repositories can be migrated from version 2.3.5 with the following steps:

Ensure that there are no open transactions and no active replication or garbage collection processes before updating the server software and during the repository layout migration.

Install the cvmfs-server 2.4 package.

The Apache configuration on the release manager machine (resp. stratum 0) and on stratum 1 repositories, as well as the configuration for the meta-data area under /cvmfs/info, should be adjusted as follows:

Change AllowOverride Limit to AllowOverride Limit AuthConfig

Reduce the cache expiry for files of type application/x-cvmfs and application/json from 2 minutes to 61 seconds

Add to the <Directory> directive for the repository

<FilesMatch "^[^.]*$">
  ForceType application/octet-stream
</FilesMatch>

Reload the Apache service and perform the following steps for all repositories:

Only on release manager machines: remove the CVMFS_CATALOG_ENTRY_WARN_THRESHOLD parameter. If it was set to a value other than 500000, set CVMFS_ROOT_KCATALOG_LIMIT=500 and CVMFS_NESTED_KCATALOG_LIMIT=500. Consider setting a lower limit for CVMFS_ROOT_KCATALOG_LIMIT.

Update /etc/cvmfs/repositories.d/<REPOSITORY>/server.conf and set CVMFS_CREATOR_VERSION=137

On release manager machines, in agreement with the repository owner it’s recommended to make a test publish

cvmfs_server transaction <REPOSITORY>
cvmfs_server publish <REPOSITORY>

before resuming normal operation.

Overview¶

The CernVM File System (CernVM-FS) is a read-only file system designed to deliver scientific software onto virtual machines and physical worker nodes in a fast, scalable, and reliable way. Files and file metadata are downloaded on demand and aggressively cached. For the distribution of files, CernVM-FS uses a standard HTTP [BernersLee96] [Fielding99] transport, which allows exploitation of a variety of web caches, including commercial content delivery networks. CernVM-FS ensures data authenticity and integrity over these possibly untrusted caches and connections. The CernVM-FS software comprises client-side software to mount “CernVM-FS repositories” (similar to AFS volumes) as well as a server-side toolkit to create such distributable CernVM-FS repositories.

A CernVM-FS client provides a virtual file system that loads data only on access. In this example, all releases of a sofware package (such as an HEP experiment framework) are hosted as a CernVM-FS repository on a web server.

The first implementation of CernVM-FS was based on grow-fs [Compostella10] [Thain05], which was originally provided as one of the private file system options available in Parrot. Ever since the design evolved and diverged, taking into account the works on HTTP- Fuse [Suzaki06] and content-delivery networks [Freedman03] [Nygren10] [Tolia03]. Its current implementation provides the following key features:

Use of the the Fuse kernel module that comes with in-kernel caching of file attributes
Cache quota management
Use of a content addressable storage format resulting in immutable files and automatic file de-duplication
Possibility to split a directory hierarchy into sub catalogs at user-defined levels
Automatic updates of file catalogs controlled by a time to live stored inside file catalogs
Digitally signed repositories
Transparent file compression/decompression and transparent file chunking
Capability to work in offline mode providing that all required files are cached
File system versioning
File system hotpatching
Dynamic expansion of environment variables embedded in symbolic links
Support for extended attributes, such as file capabilities and SElinux attributes
Automatic mirror server selection based on geographic proximity
Automatic load-balancing of proxy servers
Support for WPAD/PAC auto-configuration of proxy servers
Efficient replication of repositories
Possibility to use S3 compatible storage instead of a file system as repository storage

In contrast to general purpose network file systems such as nfs or afs, CernVM-FS is particularly crafted for fast and scalable software distribution. Running and compiling software is a use case general purpose distributed file systems are not optimized for. In contrast to virtual machine images or Docker images, software installed in CernVM-FS does not need to be further packaged. Instead it is distributed and versioned file-by-file. In order to create and update a CernVM-FS repository, a distinguished machine, the so-called Release Manager Machine, is used. On such a release manager machine, a CernVM-FS repository is mounted in read/write mode by means of a union file system [Wright04]. The union file system overlays the CernVM-FS read-only mount point by a writable scratch area. The CernVM-FS server tool kit merges changes written to the scratch area into the CernVM-FS repository. Merging and publishing changes can be triggered at user-defined points in time; it is an atomic operation. As such, a CernVM-FS repository is similar to a repository in the sense of a versioning system.

On the client, only data and metadata of the software releases that are actually used are downloaded and cached.

Opening a file on CernVM-FS. CernVM-FS resolves the name by means of an SQLite catalog. Downloaded files are verified against the cryptographic hash of the corresponding catalog entry. The stat() system call can be entirely served from the in-kernel file system buffers.

Getting Started¶

This section describes how to install the CernVM-FS client. The CernVM-FS client is supported on x86, x86_64, and ARMv7 architectures running Scientific Linux 4-7, Ubuntu $\geq12.04$, SLES 11, 12 and openSuSE 13.1, Fedora 25 and 26, or Mac OS X $\geq 10.12$. There is experimental support for AArch64 and Power 8.

Getting the Software¶

The CernVM-FS source code and binary packages are available on our website. Binary packages are produced for rpm, dpkg, and Mac OS X (.pkg). Packages for 64 bit and 32 bit Scientific Linux 5 and 6 and 64 bit Scientific Linux 7 are available as a yum repository. Ubuntu and Debian packages are available through our apt repository. The cvmfs-release packages can be used to add these yum/apt repositories to the local package sources list. The cvmfs-release packages are available on our download page.

The CernVM-FS client is not relocatable and needs to be installed under /usr. On Intel architectures, it needs a gcc $\geq 4.2$ compiler, on ARMv7 a gcc $\geq 4.7$ compiler. In order to compile and install from sources, use the following cmake command:

cmake .
make
sudo make install

Installation¶

Linux¶

To install, proceed according to the following steps:

Step 1

Install the CernVM-FS packages. With yum, run

sudo yum install cvmfs cvmfs-config-default

If yum does not show the latest packages, clean the yum cache by sudo yum clean all. Packages can be also installed with rpm instead with the command rpm -vi. On Ubuntu, use

sudo apt-get install cvmfs cvmfs-config-default

If apt does not show the latest packages, run sudo apt-get update before. Packages can be also installed with dpkg instead with the command dpkg -i.

Step 2

For the base setup, run cvmfs_config setup. Alternatively, you can do the base setup by hand: ensure that user_allow_other is set in /etc/fuse.conf, ensure that /cvmfs /etc/auto.cvmfs is set in /etc/auto.master and that the autofs service is running. If you migrate from a previous version of CernVM-FS, check the release notes if there is anything special to do for migration.

Step 3

Create /etc/cvmfs/default.local and open the file for editing.

Step 4

Select the desired repositories by setting CVMFS_REPOSITORIES=repo1,repo2,.... For ATLAS, for instance, set

CVMFS_REPOSITORIES=atlas.cern.ch,atlas-condb.cern.ch,grid.cern.ch

Specify the HTTP proxy servers on your site with

CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY="http://myproxy1:port|http://myproxy2:port"

For the syntax of more complex HTTP proxy settings, see Network Settings. Make sure your local proxy servers allow access to all the Stratum 1 web servers (more on proxy configuration here). For Cern repositories, the Stratum 1 web servers are listed in /etc/cvmfs/domain.d/cern.ch.conf.

Step 5

Check if CernVM-FS mounts the specified repositories by cvmfs_config probe. If the probe fails, try to restart autofs with sudo service autofs restart.

Mac OS X¶

On Mac OS X, CernVM-FS is based on OSXFuse. It is not integrated with autofs. In order to install, proceed according to the following steps:

Step 1

Install the CernVM-FS package by opening the .pkg file.

Step 2

Create /etc/cvmfs/default.local and open the file for editing.

Step 3

Select the desired repositories by setting CVMFS_REPOSITORIES=repo1,repo2,.... For CMS, for instance, set

CVMFS_REPOSITORIES=cms.cern.ch

Specify the HTTP proxy servers on your site with

CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY="http://myproxy1:port|http://myproxy2:port"

If you’re unsure about the proxy names, set CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY=DIRECT.

Step 4

Mount your repositories like

sudo mkdir -p /cvmfs/cms.cern.ch
sudo mount -t cvmfs cms.cern.ch /cvmfs/cms.cern.ch

Usage¶

The CernVM-FS repositories are located under /cvmfs. Each repository is identified by a fully qualified repository name. The fully qualified repository name consists of a repository identifier and a domain name, similar to DNS records [Mockapetris87]. The domain part of the fully qualified repository name indicates the location of repository creation and maintenance. For the ATLAS experiment software, for instance, the fully qualified repository name is atlas.cern.ch although the hosting web servers are spread around the world.

Mounting and un-mounting of the CernVM-FS is controlled by autofs and automount. That is, starting from the base directory /cvmfs different repositories are mounted automatically just by accessing them. For instance, running the command ls /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch will mount the ATLAS software repository on the fly. This directory gets automatically unmounted after some automount-defined idle time.

Debugging Hints¶

In order to check for common misconfigurations in the base setup, run

cvmfs_config chksetup

CernVM-FS gathers its configuration parameter from various configuration files that can overwrite each others settings (default configuration, domain specific configuration, local setup, …). To show the effective configuration for repository.cern.ch, run

cvmfs_config showconfig repository.cern.ch

In order to exclude autofs/automounter as a source of problems, you can try to mount repository.cern.ch manually by

mkdir -p /mnt/cvmfs
mount -t cvmfs repository.cern.ch /mnt/cvmfs

In order to exclude SELinux as a source of problems, you can try mounting after SELinux has been disabled by

/usr/sbin/setenforce 0

Once you sorted out a problem, make sure that you do not get the original error served from the file system buffers by

service autofs restart

In case you need additional assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us at cernvm.support@cern.ch. Together with the problem description, please send the system information tarball created by cvmfs_config bugreport.

Client Configuration¶

Structure of /etc/cvmfs¶

The local configuration of CernVM-FS is controlled by several files in /etc/cvmfs listed in the table below. For every .conf file except for the files in /etc/cvmfs/default.d you can create a corresponding .local file having the same prefix in order to customize the configuration. The .local file will be sourced after the corresponding .conf file.

In a typical installation, a handful of parameters need to be set in /etc/cvmfs/default.local. Most likely, this is the list of repositories (CVMFS_REPOSITORIES), HTTP proxies (see :ref:sct_network`), and perhaps the cache directory and the cache quota (see :ref:sct_cache`) In a few cases, one might change a parameter for a specific domain or a specific repository, provide an exclusive cache for a specific repository (see :ref:sct_cache`). For a list of all parameters, see Appendix “Client parameters”.

The .conf and .local configuration files are key-value pairs in the form PARAMETER=value. They are sourced by /bin/sh. Hence, a limited set of shell commands can be used inside these files including comments, if clauses, parameter evaluation, and shell math ($((...))). Special characters have to be quoted. For instance, instead of CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY=p1;p2, write CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY='p1;p2' in order to avoid parsing errors. The shell commands in the configuration files can use the CVMFS_FQRN parameter, which contains the fully qualified repository names that is being mounted. The current working directory is set to the parent directory of the configuration file at hand.

File	Purpose
`config.sh`	Set of internal helper functions.
`default.conf`	Set of base parameters.
`default.d/$config.conf`	Adjustments to the default.conf configuration, usually installed by a cvmfs-config-… package. Read before default.local.
`domain.d/$domain.conf`	Domain-specific parameters and implementations of the functions in `config.sh`
`config.d/$repository.conf`	Repository-specific parameters and implementations of the functions in `config.sh`
`keys/`	Contains domain-specific sub directories with public keys used to verify the digital signature of file catalogs

The “Config Repository”¶

In addition to the local system configuration, a client can configure a dedicated “config repository”. A config repository is a standard mountable CernVM-FS repository that resembles the directory structure of /etc/cvmfs. It can be used to centrally maintain the public keys and configuration of repositories that should not be distributed with rather static packages, and also to centrally blacklist compromised repository keys. Configuration from the config repository is overwritten by the local configuration in case of conflicts; see the comments in /etc/cvmfs/default.conf for the precise ordering of processing the config files. The config repository is set by the CVMFS_CONFIG_REPOSITORY parameter. The default configuration rpm cvmfs-config-default sets this parameter to cvmfs-config.cern.ch.

The CVMFS_CONFIG_REPO_REQUIRED parameter can be used to force availability of the config repository in order for other repositories to get mounted.

Mounting¶

Mounting of CernVM-FS repositories is typically handled by autofs. Just by accessing a repository directory under /cvmfs (/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch), autofs will take care of mounting. autofs will also automatically unmount a repository if it is not used for a while.

Instead of using autofs, CernVM-FS repositories can be mounted manually with the system’s mount command. In order to do so, use the cvmfs file system type, like

mount -t cvmfs atlas.cern.ch /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch

Likewise, CernVM-FS repositories can be mounted through entries in /etc/fstab. A sample entry in /etc/fstab:

atlas.cern.ch /mnt/test cvmfs defaults,_netdev,nodev 0 0

Every mount point corresponds to a CernVM-FS process. Using autofs or the system’s mount command, every repository can only be mounted once. Otherwise multiple CernVM-FS processes would collide in the same cache location. If a repository is needed under several paths, use a bind mount or use a private file system mount point.

Private Mount Points¶

In contrast to the system’s mount command which requires root privileges, CernVM-FS can also be mounted like other Fuse file systems by normal users. In this case, CernVM-FS uses parameters from one or several user-provided config files instead of using the files under /etc/cvmfs. CernVM-FS private mount points do not appear as cvmfs2 file systems but as fuse file systems. The cvmfs_config and cvmfs_talk commands ignore privately mounted CernVM-FS repositories. On an interactive machine, private mount points are for instance unaffected by an administrator unmounting all system’s CernVM-FS mount points by cvmfs_config umount.

In order to mount CernVM-FS privately, use the cvmfs2 command like

cvmfs2 -o config=myparams.conf atlas.cern.ch /home/user/myatlas

A minimal sample myparams.conf file could look like this:

CVMFS_CACHE_BASE=/home/user/mycache
CVMFS_RELOAD_SOCKETS=/home/user/mycache
CVMFS_USYSLOG=/home/user/cvmfs.log
CVMFS_CLAIM_OWNERSHIP=yes
CVMFS_SERVER_URL=http://cvmfs-stratum-one.cern.ch/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch
CVMFS_KEYS_DIR=/etc/cvmfs/keys/cern.ch
CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY=DIRECT

Make sure to use absolute path names for the mount point and for the cache directory. Use fusermount -u in order to unmount a privately mounted CernVM-FS repository.

The private mount points can also be used to use the CernVM-FS Fuse module in case it has not been installed under /usr and /etc. If the public keys are not installed under /etc/cvmfs/keys, the directory of the keys needs to be specified in the config file by CVMFS_KEYS_DIR=<directory>. If the libcvmfs_fuse.so library is not installed in one of the standard search paths, the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable has to be set accordingly for the cvmfs2 command.

Docker Containers¶

There are two options to mount CernVM-FS in docker containers. The first option is to bind mount a mounted repository as a volume into the container. This has the advantage that the CernVM-FS cache is shared among multiple containers. The second option is to mount a repository inside a container, which requires a privileged container.

Volume Driver¶

There is an external package that provides a Docker Volume Driver for CernVM-FS. This package provides management of repositories in Docker and Kubernetes. It provides a convenient interface to handle CernVM-FS volume definitions.

Bind mount from the host¶

On Docker >= 1.10, the autofs managed area /cvmfs can be directly mounted into the container as a shared mount point like

docker run -it -v /cvmfs:/cvmfs:shared centos /bin/bash

In order to bind mount an individual repository from the host, turn off autofs on the host and mount the repository manually, like:

service autofs stop  # systemd: systemctl stop autofs
chkconfig autofs off  # systemd: systemctl disable autofs
mkdir -p /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch
mount -t cvmfs sft.cern.ch /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch

Start the docker container with the -v option to mount the CernVM-FS repository inside, like

docker run -it -v /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch:/cvmfs/sft.cern.ch centos /bin/bash

The -v option can be used multiple times with different repositories.

Mount inside a container¶

In order to use mount inside a container, the container must be started in privileged mode, like

docker run --privileged -i -t centos /bin/bash

In such a container, CernVM-FS can be installed and used the usual way provided that autofs is turned off.

Parrot Connector to CernVM-FS¶

In case Fuse cannot be be installed, the parrot toolkit provides a means to “mount” CernVM-FS on Linux in pure user space. Parrot sandboxes an application in a similar way gdb sandboxes an application. But instead of debugging the application, parrot transparently rewrites file system calls and can effectively provide /cvmfs to an application. We recommend to use the latest precompiled parrot, which has CernVM-FS support built-in.

In order to sandbox a command <CMD> with options <OPTIONS> in parrot, use

export PARROT_ALLOW_SWITCHING_CVMFS_REPOSITORIES=yes
export PARROT_CVMFS_REPO="<default-repositories>"
export HTTP_PROXY='<SITE HTTP PROXY>'  # or 'DIRECT;' if not on a cluster or grid site
parrot_run <PARROT_OPTIONS> <CMD> <OPTIONS>

Repositories that are not available by default from the builtin <default-repositories> list can be explicitly added to PARROT_CVMFS_REPO. The repository name, a stratum 1 URL, and the public key of the repository need to be provided. For instance, in order to add alice-ocdb.cern.ch and ilc.desy.de to the list of repositories, one can write

export CERN_S1="http://cvmfs-stratum-one.cern.ch/cvmfs"
export DESY_S1="http://grid-cvmfs-one.desy.de:8000/cvmfs"
export PARROT_CVMFS_REPO="<default-repositories> \
  alice-ocdb.cern.ch:url=${CERN_S1}/alice-ocdb.cern.ch,pubkey=<PATH/key.pub> \
  ilc.desy.de:url=${DESY_S1}/ilc.desy.de,pubkey=<PATH/key.pub>"

given that the repository public keys are in the provided paths.

By default, parrot uses a shared CernVM-FS cache for all parrot instances of the same user stored under a temporary directory that is derived from the user id. In order to place the CernVM-FS cache into a different directory, use

export PARROT_CVMFS_ALIEN_CACHE=</path/to/cache>

In order to share this directory among multiple users, the users have to belong to the same UNIX group.

Network Settings¶

CernVM-FS uses HTTP for the data transfer. Repository data can be replicated to multiple web servers and cached by standard web proxies such as Squid [Guerrero99]. In a typical setup, repositories are replicated to a handful of web servers in different locations. These replicas form the CernVM-FS Stratum 1 service, whereas the replication source server is the CernVM-FS Stratum 0 server. In every cluster of client machines, there should be two or more web proxy servers that CernVM-FS can use (see Setting up a Local Squid Proxy). These site-local web proxies reduce the network latency for the CernVM-FS clients and they reduce the load for the Stratum 1 service. CernVM-FS supports WPAD/PAC proxy auto configuration [Gauthier99], choosing a random proxy for load-balancing, and automatic fail-over to other hosts and proxies in case of network errors. Roaming clients can connect directly to the Stratum 1 service.

IP Protocol Version¶

CernVM-FS can use both IPv4 and IPv6. For dual-stack stratum 1 hosts it will use the system default settings when connecting directly to the host. When connecting to a proxy, by default it will try on the IPv4 address unless the proxy only has IPv6 addresses configured. The CVMFS_IPFAMILY_PREFER=[4|6] parameter can be used to select the preferred IP protocol for dual-stack proxies.

Stratum 1 List¶

To specify the Stratum 1 servers, set CVMFS_SERVER_URL to a semicolon-separated list of known replica servers (enclose in quotes). The so defined URLs are organized as a ring buffer. Whenever download of files fails from a server, CernVM-FS automatically switches to the next mirror server. For repositories under the cern.ch domain, the Stratum 1 servers are specified in /etc/cvmfs/domain.d/cern.ch.conf.

It is recommended to adjust the order of Stratum 1 servers so that the closest servers are used with priority. This can be done automatically by using geographic ordering. Alternatively, for roaming clients (clients not using a proxy server), the Stratum 1 servers can be automatically sorted according to round trip time by cvmfs_talk host probe (see Auxiliary Tools). Otherwise, the proxy server would invalidate round trip time measurement.

The special sequence @fqrn@ in the CVMFS_SERVER_URL string is replaced by fully qualified repository name (atlas.cern.cn, cms.cern.ch, …). That allows to use the same parameter for many repositories hosted under the same domain. For instance, http://cvmfs-stratum-one.cern.ch/cvmfs/@fqrn@ can resolve to http://cvmfs-stratum-one.cern.ch/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch, http://cvmfs-stratum-one.cern.ch/cvmfs/cms.cern.ch, and so on depending on the repository that is being mounted. The same works for the sequence @org@ which is replaced by the unqualified repository name (atlas, cms, …).

Proxy Lists¶

CernVM-FS uses a dedicated HTTP proxy configuration, independent from system-wide settings. Instead of a single proxy, CernVM-FS uses a chain of load-balanced proxy groups. The CernVM-FS proxies are set by the CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY parameter.

Proxies within the same proxy group are considered as a load-balance group and a proxy is selected randomly. If a proxy fails, CernVM-FS automatically switches to another proxy from the current group. If all proxies from a group have failed, CernVM-FS switches to the next proxy group. After probing the last proxy group in the chain, the first proxy is probed again. To avoid endless loops, for each file download the number of switches is restricted by the total number of proxies.

The chain of proxy groups is specified by a string of semicolon separated entries, each group is a list of pipe separated hostnames [1]. Multiple IP addresses behind a single proxy host name (DNS round-robin entry) are automatically transformed into a load-balanced group. In order to limit the number of proxy servers used from a round-robin DNS entry, set CVMFS_MAX_IPADDR_PER_PROXY. This also limits the perceived “hang duration” while CernVM-FS performs fail-overs.

The DIRECT keyword for a hostname avoids using proxies. Note that the CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY parameter is necessary in order to mount. If you don’t use proxies, set the parameter to DIRECT.

Multiple proxy groups are often organized as a primary proxy group at the local site and backup proxy groups at remote sites. In order to avoid CernVM-FS being stuck with proxies at a remote site after a fail-over, CernVM-FS will automatically retry to use proxies from the primary group after some time. The delay for re-trying a proxies from the primary group is set in seconds by CVMFS_PROXY_RESET_AFTER. The distinction of primary and backup proxy groups can be turned off by setting this parameter to 0.

Automatic Proxy Configuration¶

The proxy settings can be automatically gathered through WPAD. The special proxy server “auto” in CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY is resolved according to the proxy server specification loaded from a PAC file. PAC files can be on a file system or accessible via HTTP. CernVM-FS looks for PAC files in the order given by the semicolon separated URLs in the CVMFS_PAC_URLS environment variable. This variable defaults to http://wpad/wpad.dat. The auto keyword used as a URL in CVMFS_PAC_URLS is resolved to http://wpad/wpad.dat, too, in order to be compatible with Frontier [Blumenfeld08].

Fallback Proxy List¶

In addition to the regular proxy list set by CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY, a fallback proxy list is supported in CVMFS_FALLBACK_PROXY. The syntax of both lists is the same. The fallback proxy list is appended to the regular proxy list, and if the fallback proxy list is set, any DIRECT is removed from both lists. The automatic proxy configuration of the previous section only sets the regular proxy list, not the fallback proxy list. Also the fallback proxy list can be automatically reordered; see the next section.

Ordering of Servers according to Geographic Proximity¶

CernVM-FS Stratum 1 servers provide a RESTful service for geographic ordering. Clients can request http://<HOST>/cvmfs/<FQRN>/api/v1.0/geo/<proxy_address>/<server_list> The proxy address can be replaced by a UUID if no proxies are used, and the CernVM-FS client does that if there are no regular proxies. The server list is comma-separated. The result is an ordered list of indexes of the input host names. Use of this API can be enabled in a CernVM-FS client with CVMFS_USE_GEOAPI=yes. That will geographically sort both the servers set by CVMFS_SERVER_URL and the fallback proxies set by CVMFS_FALLBACK_PROXY.

Timeouts¶

CernVM-FS tries to gracefully recover from broken network links and temporarily overloaded paths. The timeout for connection attempts and for very slow downloads can be set by CVMFS_TIMEOUT and CVMFS_TIMEOUT_DIRECT. The two timeout parameters apply to a connection with a proxy server and to a direct connection to a Stratum 1 server, respectively. A download is considered to be “very slow” if the transfer rate is below for more than the timeout interval. The threshold can be adjusted with the CVMFS_LOW_SPEED_LIMIT parameter. A very slow download is treated like a broken connection.

On timeout errors and on connection failures (but not on name resolving failures), CernVM-FS will retry the path using an exponential backoff. This introduces a jitter in case there are many concurrent requests by a cluster of nodes, allowing a proxy server or web server to serve all the nodes consecutively. CVMFS_MAX_RETRIES sets the number of retries on a given path before CernVM-FS tries to switch to another proxy or host. The overall number of requests with a given proxy/host combination is $CVMFS_MAX_RETRIES+1. CVMFS_BACKOFF_INIT sets the maximum initial backoff in seconds. The actual initial backoff is picked with milliseconds precision randomly in the interval $[1, \text{\$CVMFS\_BACKOFF\_INIT}\cdot 1000]$. With every retry, the backoff is then doubled.

Cache Settings¶

Downloaded files will be stored in a local cache directory. The CernVM-FS cache has a soft quota; as a safety margin, the partition hosting the cache should provide more space than the soft quota limit. Once the quota limit is reached, CernVM-FS will automatically remove files from the cache according to the least recently used policy. Removal of files is performed bunch-wise until half of the maximum cache size has been freed. The quota limit can be set in Megabytes by CVMFS_QUOTA_LIMIT. For typical repositories, a few Gigabytes make a good quota limit.

The cache directory needs to be on a local file system in order to allow each host the accurate accounting of the cache contents; on a network file system, the cache can potentially be modified by other hosts. Furthermore, the cache directory is used to create (transient) sockets and pipes, which is usually only supported by a local file system. The location of the cache directory can be set by CVMFS_CACHE_BASE.

On SELinux enabled systems, the cache directory and its content need to be labeled as cvmfs_cache_t. During the installation of CernVM-FS RPMs, this label is set for the default cache directory /var/lib/cvmfs. For other directories, the label needs to be set manually by chcon -Rv --type=cvmfs_cache_t $CVMFS_CACHE_BASE.

Each repository can either have an exclusive cache or join the CernVM-FS shared cache. The shared cache enforces a common quota for all repositories used on the host. File duplicates across repositories are stored only once in the shared cache. The quota limit of the shared directory should be at least the maximum of the recommended limits of its participating repositories. In order to have a repository not join the shared cache but use an exclusive cache, set CVMFS_SHARED_CACHE=no.

Alien Cache¶

An “alien cache” provides the possibility to use a data cache outside the control of CernVM-FS. This can be necessary, for instance, in HPC environments where local disk space is not available or scarce but powerful cluster file systems are available. The alien cache directory is a directory in addition to the ordinary cache directory. The ordinary cache directory is still used to store control files.

The alien cache directory is set by the CVMFS_ALIEN_CACHE option. It can be located anywhere including cluster and network file systems. If configured, all data chunks are stored there. CernVM-FS ensures atomic access to the cache directory. It is safe to have the alien directory shared by multiple CernVM-FS processes and it is safe to unlink files from the alien cache directory anytime. The contents of files, however, must not be touched by third-party programs.

In contrast to normal cache mode where files are store in mode 0600, in the alien cache files are stored in mode 0660. So all users being part of the alien cache directory’s owner group can use it.

The skeleton of the alien cache directory should be created upfront. Otherwise, the first CernVM-FS process accessing the alien cache determines the ownership. The cvmfs2 binary can create such a skeleton using

cvmfs2 __MK_ALIEN_CACHE__ $alien_cachedir $owner_uid $owner_gid

Since the alien cache is unmanaged, there is no automatic quota management provided by CernVM-FS; the alien cache directory is ever-growing. The CVMFS_ALIEN_CACHE requires CVMFS_QUOTA_LIMIT=-1 and CVMFS_SHARED_CACHE=no.

The alien cache might be used in combination with a special repository replication mode that preloads a cache directory (Section Setting up a Replica Server (Stratum 1)). This allows to propagate an entire repository into the cache of a cluster file system for HPC setups that do not allow outgoing connectivity.

Advanced Cache Configuration¶

For exotic cache configurations, CernVM-FS supports specifying multiple, independent “cache manager instances” of different types. Such cache manager instances replace the local cache directory. Since the local cache directory is also used to store transient special files, CVMFS_WORKSPACE=$local_path must be used when advanced cache configuration is used.

A concrete cache manager instance has a user-defined name and it is specified like

CVMFS_CACHE_PRIMARY=myInstanceName
CVMFS_CACHE_myInstanceName_TYPE=posix

Multiple instances can thus be safely defined with different names but only one is selected when the client boots. The following table lists the valid cache manager instance types.

Type	Behavior
posix	Uses a cache directory with the standard cache implementation
tiered	Uses two other cache manager instances in a layered configuration
external	Uses an external cache plugin process (see Section Client Plug-Ins)

The instance name “default” is blocked because the regular cache configuration syntax is automatically mapped to CVMFS_CACHE_default_... parameters. The command sudo cvmfs_talk cache instance can be used to show the currently used cache manager instance.

Tiered Cache¶

The tiered cache manager combines two other cache manager instances as an upper layer and a lower layer into a single functional cache manager. Usually, a small and fast upper layer (SSD, memory) is combined with a larger and slower lower layer (HDD, network drive). The upper layer needs to be large enough to serve all currently open files. On an upper layer cache miss, CernVM-FS tries to copy the missing object from the lower into the upper layer. On a lower layer cache miss, CernVM-FS download and stores objects either in both layers or in the upper layer only, depending on the configuration.

The parameters CVMFS_CACHE_$tieredInstanceName_UPPER and CVMFS_CACHE_$tieredInstanceName_LOWER set the names of the upper and the lower instances. The parameter CVMFS_CACHE_$tieredInstanceName_LOWER_READONLY=[yes|no] controls whether the lower layer can be populated by the client or not.

External Cache Plugin¶

A CernVM-FS cache manager instance can be provided by an external process. The cache manager process and the CernVM-FS client are connected through a socket, whose address is called “locator”. The locator can either address a UNIX domain socket on the local file system, or a TCP socket, as in the following examples

CVMFS_CACHE_instanceName_LOCATOR=unix=/var/lib/cvmfs/cache.socket
# or
CVMFS_CACHE_instanceName_LOCATOR=tcp=192.168.0.24:4242

If a UNIX domain socket is used, both the CernVM-FS client and the cache manager need to be able to access the socket file. Usually that means they have to run under the same user.

Instead of manually starting the cache manager, the CernVM-FS client can optionally automatically start and stop the cache manager process. This is called a “supervised cache manager”. The first booting CernVM-FS client starts the cache manager process, the last terminating client stops the cache manager process. In order to start the cache manager in supervised mode, use CVMFS_CACHE_instanceName_CMDLINE=<executable and arguments>, using a comma (,) instead of a space to separate the command line parameters.

Example¶

The following example configures a tiered cache with an external cache plugin as an upper layer and a read-only, network drive as a lower layer. The cache plugin uses memory to cache data and is part of the CernVM-FS client. This configuration could be used in a data center with diskless nodes and a preloaded cache on a network drive (see Chapter CernVM-FS on Supercomputers)

CVMFS_WORKSPACE=/var/lib/cvmfs
CVMFS_CACHE_PRIMARY=hpc

CVMFS_CACHE_hpc_TYPE=tiered
CVMFS_CACHE_hpc_UPPER=memory
CVMFS_CACHE_hpc_LOWER=preloaded
CVMFS_CACHE_hpc_LOWER_READONLY=yes

CVMFS_CACHE_memory_TYPE=external
CVMFS_CACHE_memory_CMDLINE=/usr/libexec/cvmfs/cache/cvmfs_cache_ram,/etc/cvmfs/cache-mem.conf
CVMFS_CACHE_memory_LOCATOR=unix=/var/lib/cvmfs/cvmfs-cache.socket

CVMFS_CACHE_preloaded_TYPE=posix
CVMFS_CACHE_preloaded_ALIEN=/gpfs/cvmfs/alien
CVMFS_CACHE_preloaded_SHARED=no
CVMFS_CACHE_preloaded_QUOTA_LIMIT=-1

The example configuration for the in-memory cache plugin in /etc/cvmfs/cache-mem.conf is

CVMFS_CACHE_PLUGIN_LOCATOR=unix=/var/lib/cvmfs/cvmfs-cache.socket
# 2G RAM
CVMFS_CACHE_PLUGIN_SIZE=2000

NFS Server Mode¶

In case there is no local hard disk space available on a cluster of worker nodes, a single CernVM-FS client can be exported via nfs [Callaghan95] [Shepler03] to these worker nodes.This mode of deployment will inevitably introduce a performance bottleneck and a single point of failure and should be only used if necessary.

NSF export requires Linux kernel >= 2.6.27 on the NFS server. For instance, exporting works for Scientific Linux 6 but not for Scientific Linux 5. The NFS server should run a lock server as well. For proper NFS support, set CVMFS_NFS_SOURCE=yes. On the client side, all available nfs implementations should work.

In the NFS mode, upon mount an additionally directory nfs_maps.$repository_name appears in the CernVM-FS cache directory. These NFS maps use leveldb to store the virtual inode CernVM-FS issues for any accessed path. The virtual inode may be requested by NFS clients anytime later. As the NFS server has no control over the lifetime of client caches, entries in the NFS maps cannot be removed.

Typically, every entry in the NFS maps requires some 150-200 Bytes. A recursive find on /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch with 50 million entries, for instance, would add up 8GB in the cache directory. For a CernVM-FS instance that is exported via NFS, the safety margin for the NFS maps needs be taken into account. It also might be necessary to monitor the actual space consumption.

Tuning¶

The default settings in CernVM-FS are tailored to the normal, non-NFS use case. For decent performance in the NFS deployment, the amount of memory given to the meta-data cache should be increased. By default, this is 16M. It can be increased, for instance, to 256M by setting CVMFS_MEMCACHE_SIZE to 256. Furthermore, the maximum number of download retries should be increased to at least 2.

The number of NFS daemons should be increased as well. A value of 128 NFS daemons has shown perform well. In Scientific Linux, the number of NFS daemons is set by the RPCNFSDCOUNT parameter in /etc/sysconfig/nfs.

The performance will benefit from large RAM on the NFS server ($\geq$ 16GB) and CernVM-FS caches hosted on an SSD hard drive.

Shared NFS Maps (HA-NFS)¶

As an alternative to the existing, leveldb managed NFS maps, the NFS maps can optionally be managed out of the CernVM-FS cache directory by SQLite. This allows the NFS maps to be placed on shared storage and accessed by multiple CernVM-FS NFS export nodes simultaneously for clustering and active high-availablity setups. In order to enable shared NFS maps, set CVMFS_NFS_SHARED to the path that should be used to host the SQLite database. If the path is on shared storage, the shared storage has to support POSIX file locks. The drawback of the SQLite managed NFS maps is a significant performance penalty which in practice can be covered by the memory caches.

Example¶

An example entry /etc/exports (note: the fsid needs to be different for every exported CernVM-FS repository)

/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch 172.16.192.0/24(ro,sync,no_root_squash,\
  no_subtree_check,fsid=101)

A sample entry /etc/fstab entry on a client:

172.16.192.210:/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch nfs4 \
  ro,ac,actimeo=60,lookupcache=all,nolock,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576 0 0

Hotpatching and Reloading¶

By hotpatching a running CernVM-FS instance, most of the code can be reloaded without unmounting the file system. The current active code is unloaded and the code from the currently installed binaries is loaded. Hotpatching is logged to syslog. Since CernVM-FS is re-initialized during hotpatching and configuration parameters are re-read, hotpatching can be also seen as a “reload”.

Hotpatching has to be done for all repositories concurrently by

cvmfs_config [-c] reload

The optional parameter -c specifies if the CernVM-FS cache should be wiped out during the hotpatch. Reloading of the parameters of a specific repository can be done like

cvmfs_config reload atlas.cern.ch

In order to see the history of loaded CernVM-FS Fuse modules, run

cvmfs_talk hotpatch history

The currently loaded set of parameters can be shown by

cvmfs_talk parameters

The CernVM-FS packages use hotpatching in the package upgrade process.

Auxiliary Tools¶

cvmfs_fsck¶

CernVM-FS assumes that the local cache directory is trustworthy. However, it might happen that files get corrupted in the cache directory caused by errors outside the scope of CernVM-FS. CernVM-FS stores files in the local disk cache with their cryptographic content hash key as name, which makes it easy to verify file integrity. CernVM-FS contains the cvmfs_fsck utility to do so for a specific cache directory. Its return value is comparable to the system’s fsck. For example,

cvmfs_fsck -j 8 /var/lib/cvmfs/shared

checks all the data files and catalogs in /var/lib/cvmfs/shared using 8 concurrent threads. Supported options are:

`-v`	Produce more verbose output.
`-j #threads`	Sets the number of concurrent threads that check files in the cache directory. Defaults to 4.
`-p`	Tries to automatically fix problems.
`-f`	Unlinks the cache database. The database will be automatically rebuilt by CernVM-FS on next mount.

The cvmfs_config fsck command can be used to verify all configured repositories.

cvmfs_config¶

The cvmfs_config utility provides commands in order to setup the system for use with CernVM-FS.

setup: The setup command takes care of basic setup tasks, such as creating the cvmfs user and allowing access to CernVM-FS mount points by all users.
chksetup: The chksetup command inspects the system and the CernVM-FS configuration in /etc/cvmfs for common problems.
showconfig: The showconfig command prints the CernVM-FS parameters for all repositories or for the specific repository given as argument. With the -s option, only non-empty parameters are shown.
stat: The stat command prints file system and network statistics for currently mounted repositories.
status: The status command shows all currently mounted repositories and the process id (PID) of the CernVM-FS processes managing a mount point.
probe: The probe command tries to access /cvmfs/$repository for all repositories specified in CVMFS_REPOSITORIES or the ones specified as a space separated list on the command line, respectively.
fsck: Run cvmfs_fsck on all repositories specified in CVMFS_REPOSITORIES.
reload: The reload command is used to reload or hotpatch CernVM-FS instances.
umount: The umount command unmounts all currently mounted CernVM-FS repositories, which will only succeed if there are no open file handles on the repositories.
wipecache: The wipecache command is an alias for reload -c.
killall: The killall command immediately unmounts all repositories under /cvmfs and terminates the associated processes. It is meant to escape from a hung state without the need to reboot a machine. However, all processes that use CernVM-FS at the time will be terminated, too. The need to use this command very likely points to a network problem or a bug in cvmfs.
bugreport: The bugreport command creates a tarball with collected system information which helps to debug a problem.

cvmfs_talk¶

The cvmfs_talk command provides a way to control a currently running CernVM-FS process and to extract information about the status of the corresponding mount point. Most of the commands are for special purposes only or covered by more convenient commands, such as cvmfs_config showconfig or cvmfs_config stat. Three commands might be of particular interest though.

cvmfs_talk cleanup 0

will, without interruption of service, immediately cleanup the cache from all files that are not currently pinned in the cache.

cvmfs_talk cleanup rate 120

shows the number of cache cleanups in the last two hours (120 minutes). If this value is larger than one or two, the cache size is probably two small and the client experiences cache thrashing.

cvmfs_talk internal affairs

prints the internal status information and performance counters. It can be helpful for performance engineering.

Other¶

Information about the current cache usage can be gathered using the df utility. For repositories created with the CernVM-FS 2.1 toolchain, information about the overall number of file system entries in the repository as well as the number of entries covered by currently loaded meta-data can be gathered by df -i.

For the Nagios monitoring system [Schubert08], a checker plugin is available on our website.

Debug Logs¶

The cvmfs2 binary forks a watchdog process on start. Using this watchdog, CernVM-FS is able to create a stack trace in case certain signals (such as a segmentation fault) are received. The watchdog writes the stack trace into syslog as well as into a file stacktrace in the cache directory.

In addition to these debugging hints, CernVM-FS can be started in debug mode. In the debug mode, CernVM-FS will log with high verbosity which makes the debug mode unsuitable for production use. In order to turn on the debug mode, set CVMFS_DEBUGFILE=/tmp/cvmfs.log.

Footnotes

[1]	The usual proxy notation rules apply, like `http://proxy1:8080\|http://proxy2:8080;DIRECT`

Setting up a Local Squid Proxy¶

For clusters of nodes with CernVM-FS clients, we strongly recommend to setup two or more Squid forward proxy servers as well. The forward proxies will reduce the latency for the local worker nodes, which is critical for cold cache performance. They also reduce the load on the Stratum 1 servers.

From what we have seen, a Squid server on commodity hardware scales well for at least a couple of hundred worker nodes. The more RAM and hard disk you can devote for caching the better. We have good experience with of memory cache and of hard disk cache. We suggest to setup two identical Squid servers for reliability and load-balancing. Assuming the two servers are A and B, set

CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY="http://A:3128|http://B:3128"

Squid is very powerful and has lots of configuration and tuning options. For CernVM-FS we require only the very basic static content caching. If you already have a Frontier Squid [Blumenfeld08] [Dykstra10] installed you can use it as well for CernVM-FS.

Otherwise, cache sizes and access control needs to be configured in order to use the Squid server with CernVM-FS. In order to do so, browse through your /etc/squid/squid.conf and make sure the following lines appear accordingly:

minimum_expiry_time 0

max_filedesc 8192
maximum_object_size 1024 MB

cache_mem 128 MB
maximum_object_size_in_memory 128 KB
# 50 GB disk cache
cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 50000 16 256

Furthermore, Squid needs to allow access to all Stratum 1 servers. This is controlled through Squid ACLs. For the Stratum 1 servers for the cern.ch, egi.eu, and opensciencegrid.org domains, add the following lines to you Squid configuration:

acl cvmfs dst cvmfs-stratum-one.cern.ch
acl cvmfs dst cernvmfs.gridpp.rl.ac.uk
acl cvmfs dst cvmfs.racf.bnl.gov
acl cvmfs dst cvmfs02.grid.sinica.edu.tw
acl cvmfs dst cvmfs.fnal.gov
acl cvmfs dst cvmfs-atlas-nightlies.cern.ch
acl cvmfs dst cvmfs-egi.gridpp.rl.ac.uk
acl cvmfs dst klei.nikhef.nl
acl cvmfs dst cvmfsrepo.lcg.triumf.ca
acl cvmfs dst cvmfsrep.grid.sinica.edu.tw
acl cvmfs dst cvmfs-s1bnl.opensciencegrid.org
acl cvmfs dst cvmfs-s1fnal.opensciencegrid.org
http_access allow cvmfs

The Squid configuration can be verified by squid -k parse. Before the first service start, the cache space on the hard disk needs to be prepared by squid -z. In order to make the increased number of file descriptors effective for Squid, execute ulimit -n 8192 prior to starting the squid service.

CernVM-FS on Supercomputers¶

There are several characteristics in which supercomputers can differ from other nodes with respect to CernVM-FS

Fuse is not allowed on the individual nodes

Individual nodes do not have Internet connectivity

Nodes have no local hard disk to store the CernVM-FS cache

These problems can be overcome as described in the following sections.

Parrot-Mounted CernVM-FS in lieu of Fuse Module¶

Instead of accessing /cvmfs through a Fuse module, processes can use the Parrot connector. The parrot connector works on x86_64 Linux if the ptrace system call is not disabled. In contrast to a plain copy of a CernVM-FS repository to a shared file system, this approach has the following advantages:

Millions of synchronized meta-data operations per node (path lookups, in particular) will not drown the shared cluster file system but resolve locally in the parrot-cvmfs clients.

The file system is always consistent; applications never see half-synchronized directories.

After initial preloading, only change sets need to be transfered to the shared file system. This is much faster than rsync, which always has to browse the entire name space.

Identical files are internally de-duplicated. While space of the order of terabytes is usually not an issue for HPC shared file systems, file system caches benefit from deduplication. It is also possible to preload only specific parts of a repository namespace.

Support for extra functionality implemented by CernVM-FS such as versioning and variant symlinks (symlinks resolved according to environment variables).

Preloading the CernVM-FS Cache¶

The cvmfs_preload utility can be used to preload a CernVM-FS cache onto the shared cluster file system. Internally it uses the same code that is used to replicate between CernVM-FS stratum 0 and stratum 1. The cvmfs_preload command is a self-extracting binary with no further dependencies and should work on a majority of x86_64 Linux hosts.

The cvmfs_preload command replicates from a stratum 0 (not from a stratum 1). Because this induces significant load on the source server, stratum 0 administrators should be informed before using their server as a source. As an example, in order to preload the ALICE repository into /shared/cache, one could run from a login node

cvmfs_preload -u http://cvmfs-stratum-zero-hpc.cern.ch:8000/cvmfs/alice.cern.ch -r /shared/cache

This will preload the entire repository. In order to preload only specific parts of the namespace, you can create a _dirtab_ file with path prefixes. The path prefixes must not involve symbolic links. An example dirtab file for ALICE could look like

/example/etc
/example/x86_64-2.6-gnu-4.8.3/Modules
/example/x86_64-2.6-gnu-4.8.3/Packages/GEANT3
/example/x86_64-2.6-gnu-4.8.3/Packages/ROOT
/example/x86_64-2.6-gnu-4.8.3/Packages/gcc
/example/x86_64-2.6-gnu-4.8.3/Packages/AliRoot/v5*

The corresponding invokation of cvmfs_preload is

cvmfs_preload -u http://cvmfs-stratum-zero-hpc.cern.ch:8000/cvmfs/alice.cern.ch -r /shared/cache \
  -d </path/to/dirtab>

The initial preloading can take several hours to a few days. Subsequent invokations of the same command only transfer a change set and typically finish within seconds or minutes. These subsequent invokations need to be either done manually when necessary or scheduled for instance with a cron job.

The cvmfs_preload command can preload files from multiple repositories into the same cache directory.

Access from the Nodes¶

In order to access a preloaded cache from the nodes, set the path to the directory as an Alien Cache. Since there won’t be cache misses, parrot or fuse clients do not need to download additional files from the network.

If clients do have network access, they might find a repository version online that is newer than the preloaded version in the cache. This results in conflicts with cvmfs_preload or in errors if the cache directory is read-only. Therefore, we recommend to explicitly disable network access for the parrot process on the nodes, for instance by setting

HTTP_PROXY='INVALID-PROXY'

before the invocation of parrot_run.

Compiling `cvmfs_preload` from Sources¶

In order to compile cvmfs_preload from sources, use the -DBUILD_PRELOADER=yes cmake option.

Loopback File Systems for Nodes’ Caches¶

If nodes have Internet access but no local hard disk, it is preferable to provide the CernVM-FS caches as loopback file systems on the cluster file system. This way, CernVM-FS automatically populates the cache with the latest upstream content. A Fuse mounted CernVM-FS will also automatically manage the cache quota.

This approach requires a separate file for every node (not every mountpoint) on the cluster file system. The file should be 15% larger than the configured CernVM-FS cache size on the nodes, and it should be formatted with an ext3/4 or an xfs file system. These files can be created with the dd and mkfs utilities. Nodes can mount these files as loopback file systems from the shared file system.

Because there is only a single file for every node, the parallelism of the cluster file system can be exploited and all the requests from CernVM-FS circumvent the cluster file system’s meta-data server(s).

Tiered Cache and Cache Plugins¶

Diskless compute nodes can also combine an in-memory cache with a preloaded directory on the shared cluster file system. An example configuration can be found in Section Example.

Creating a Repository (Stratum 0)¶

CernVM-FS is a file system with a single source of (new) data. This single source, the repository Stratum 0, is maintained by a dedicated release manager machine or installation box. A read-writable copy of the repository is accessible on the release manager machine. The CernVM-FS server tool kit is used to publish the current state of the repository on the release manager machine. Publishing is an atomic operation.

All data stored in CernVM-FS have to be converted into a CernVM-FS repository during the process of publishing. The CernVM-FS repository is a form of content-addressable storage. Conversion includes creating the file catalog(s), compressing new and updated files and calculating content hashes. Storing the data in a content-addressable format results in automatic file de-duplication. It furthermore simplifies data verification and it allows for file system snapshots.

In order to provide a writable CernVM-FS repository, CernVM-FS uses a union file system that combines a read-only CernVM-FS mount point with a writable scratch area. This figure below outlines the process of publishing a repository.

CernVM-FS Server Quick-Start Guide¶

System Requirements¶

Apache HTTP server or S3 compatible storage service
union file system in the kernel
- AUFS (see Installing the AUFS-enabled Kernel on Scientific Linux 6)
- OverlayFS (as of kernel version 4.2.x or RHEL7.3)
Officially supported platforms
- Scientific Linux 6 (64 bit - with custom AUFS enabled kernel - Appendix “Available Packages”)
- CentOS/SL >= 7.3, provided that /var/spool/cvmfs is served by an ext4 file system.
- Fedora 25 and above (with kernel $\ge$ 4.2.x)
- Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit and above
  - Ubuntu < 15.10: with installed AUFS kernel module (cf. linux-image-extra package)
  - Ubuntu 15.10 and later (using upstream OverlayFS)

Installation¶

Install cvmfs and cvmfs-server packages
Ensure enough disk space in /var/spool/cvmfs (>50GiB)
For local storage: Ensure enough disk space in /srv/cvmfs
Create a repository with cvmfs_server mkfs (See Repository Creation)

Content Publishing¶

cvmfs_server transaction <repository name>
Install content into /cvmfs/<repository name>
Create nested catalogs at proper locations
- Create .cvmfscatalog files (See Managing Nested Catalogs) or
- Consider using a .cvmfsdirtab file (See Managing Nested Catalogs with .cvmfsdirtab)
cvmfs_server publish <repository name>

Backup Policy¶

Create backups of signing key files in /etc/cvmfs/keys
Entire repository content
- For local storage: /srv/cvmfs
- Stratum 1s can serve as last-ressort backup of repository content

Installing the AUFS-enabled Kernel on Scientific Linux 6¶

CernVM-FS uses the union file-system aufs to efficiently determine file-system tree updates while publishing repository transactions on the server (see Figure below). Note that this is only required on a CernVM-FS server and not on the client machines.

We provide customised kernel packages for Scientific Linux 6 (see Appendix “Available Packages”) and keep them up-to-date with upstream kernel updates. The kernel RPMs are published in the cernvm-kernel yum repository.

Please follow these steps to install the provided customised kernel:

Download the latest cvmfs-release package from the CernVM website
Install the cvmfs-release package: yum install cvmfs-release*.rpm

This adds the CernVM yum repositories to your machine’s configuration.
Install the aufs enabled kernel from cernvm-kernel:

yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=cernvm-kernel install kernel
Install the aufs user utilities:

yum --enablerepo=cernvm-kernel install aufs2-util
Reboot the machine

Once a new kernel version is released yum update will not pick the upstream version but it will wait until the patched kernel with aufs support is published by the CernVM team. We always try to follow the kernel updates as quickly as possible.

Publishing a new Repository Revision¶

CernVM-FS server schematic update overview

Updating a mounted CernVM-FS repository by overlaying it with a copy-on-write union file system volume. Any changes will be accumulated in a writable volume (yellow) and can be synchronized into the CernVM-FS repository afterwards. The file catalog contains the directory structure as well as file metadata, symbolic links, and secure hash keys of regular files. Regular files are compressed and renamed to their cryptographic content hash before copied into the data store.

Since the repositories may contain many file system objects (i.e. ATLAS contains $70 * 10^6$ file system objects – February 2016), we cannot afford to generate an entire repository from scratch for every update. Instead, we add a writable file system layer on top of a mounted read-only CernVM-FS repository using a union file system. This renders a read-only CernVM-FS mount point writable to the user, while all performed changes are stored in a special writable scratch area managed by the union file system. A similar approach is used by Linux Live Distributions that are shipped on read-only media, but allow virtual editing of files where changes are stored on a RAM disk.

If a file in the CernVM-FS repository gets changed, the union file system first copies it to the writable volume and applies any changes to this copy (copy-on-write semantics). Also newly created files or directories will be stored in the writable volume. Additionally the union file system creates special hidden files (called white-outs) to keep track of file deletions in the CernVM-FS repository.

Eventually, all changes applied to the repository are stored in this scratch area and can be merged into the actual CernVM-FS repository by a subsequent synchronization step. Up until the actual synchronization step takes place, no changes are applied to the CernVM-FS repository. Therefore, any unsuccessful updates to a repository can be rolled back by simply clearing the writable file system layer of the union file system.

Requirements for a new Repository¶

In order to create a repository, the server and client part of CernVM-FS must be installed on the release manager machine. Furthermore you will need a kernel containing a union file system implementation as well as a running Apache2 web server. Currently we support Scientific Linux 6, Ubuntu 12.04+ and Fedora 25+ distributions. Please note, that Scientific Linux 6 does not ship with an aufs enabled kernel, therefore we provide a compatible patched kernel as RPMs (see Installing the AUFS-enabled Kernel on Scientific Linux 6 for details).

CernVM-FS 2.2.0 supports both OverlayFS and aufs as a union file system. At least a 4.2.x kernel is needed to use CernVM-FS with OverlayFS. (Red Hat) Enterprise Linux >= 7.3 works, too, provided that /var/spool/cvmfs is served by an ext3 or ext4 file system. Furthermore note that OverlayFS cannot fully comply with POSIX semantics, in particular hard links must be broken into individual files. That is usually not a problem but should be kept in mind when installing certain software distributions into a CernVM-FS repository.

Notable CernVM-FS Server Locations and Files¶

There are a number of possible customisations in the CernVM-FS server installation. The following table provides an overview of important configuration files and intrinsical paths together with some customisation hints. For an exhaustive description of the CernVM-FS server infrastructure please consult Appendix “CernVM-FS Server Infrastructure”.

File Path	Description
`/cvmfs`	Repository mount points Contains read-only union file system mountpoints that become writable during repository updates. Do not symlink or manually mount anything here.
`/srv/cvmfs`	Central repository storage location Can be mounted or symlinked to another location before creating the first repository.
`/srv/cvmfs/<fqrn>`	Storage location of a repository Can be symlinked to another location before creating the repository `<fqrn>`.
`/var/spool/cvmfs`	Internal states of repositories Can be mounted or symlinked to another location before creating the first repository. Hosts the scratch area described here, thus might consume notable disk space during repository updates.
`/etc/cvmfs`	Configuration files and keychains Similar to the structure described in this table. Do not symlink this directory.
`/etc/cvmfs/cvmfs_server_hooks.sh`	Customisable server behaviour See “Customizable Actions Using Server Hooks” for further details
`/etc/cvmfs/repositories.d`	Repository configuration location Contains repository server specific configuration files.

CernVM-FS Repository Creation and Updating¶

The CernVM-FS server tool kit provides the cvmfs_server utility in order to perform all operations related to repository creation, updating, deletion, replication and inspection. Without any parameters it prints a short documentation of its commands.

Repository Creation¶

A new repository is created by cvmfs_server mkfs:

cvmfs_server mkfs my.repo.name

The utility will ask for a user that should act as the owner of the repository and afterwards create all the infrastructure for the new CernVM-FS repository. Additionally it will create a reasonable default configuration and generate a new release manager certificate and by default a new master key and corresponding public key (see more about that in the next section).

The cvmfs_server utility will use /srv/cvmfs as storage location by default. In case a separate hard disk should be used, a partition can be mounted on /srv/cvmfs or /srv/cvmfs can be symlinked to another location (see Notable CernVM-FS Server Locations and Files). Besides local storage it is possible to use an S3 compatible storage service as data backend.

Once created, the repository is mounted under /cvmfs/my.repo.name containing only a single file called new_repository. The next steps describe how to change the repository content.

The repository name resembles a DNS scheme but it does not need to reflect any real server name. It is supposed to be a globally unique name that indicates where/who the publishing of content takes place. A repository name must only contain alphanumeric characters plus -, _, and . and it is limited to a length of 60 characters.

Master keys¶

Each cvmfs repository uses two sets of keys, one for the individual repository and another called the “masterkey” which signs the repository key. The pub key that corresponds to the masterkey is what needs to be distributed to clients to verify the authenticity of the repository. It is usually most convenient to share the masterkey between all repositories in a domain so new repositories can be added without updating the client configurations. If the clients are maintained by multiple organizations it can be very difficult to quickly update the distributed pub key, so in that case it is important to keep the masterkey especially safe from being stolen. If only repository keys are stolen, they can be replaced without having to update client configurations.

By default, cvmfs_server mkfs my.repo.name creates a new /etc/cvmfs/keys/my.repo.name.masterkey and corresponding /etc/cvmfs/keys/my.repo.name.pub for every new repository. Additional user-written procedures can then be applied to replace those files with a common masterkey/pub pair, and then cvmfs_server resign must be run to update the corresponding signature (in /srv/cvmfs/my.repo.name/.cvmfswhitelist). Signatures are only good for 30 days by default, so cvmfs_server resign must be run again before they expire.

cvmfs_server also supports the ability to store the masterkey in a separate inexpensive smartcard, so that even if the computer hosting the repositories is compromised, the masterkey cannot be stolen. Smartcards allow writing keys into them and signing files but they never allow reading the keys back. Currently the supported hardware are the Yubikey 4 or Nano USB devices.

If one of those devices is plugged in to a release manager machine, this is how to use it:

Create a repository with cvmfs_server mkfs my.repo.name
Store its masterkey and pub into the smartcard with cvmfs_server masterkeycard -s my.repo.name
Make a backup copy of /etc/cvmfs/keys/my.repo.name.masterkey on

at least one USB flash drive because the next step will irretrievably delete the file. Keep the flash drive offline in a safe place in case something happens to the smartcard.
Convert the repository to use the smartcard with cvmfs_server masterkeycard -c my.repo.name. This will delete the masterkey file. This command can also be applied to other repositories on the same machine; their pub file will be updated with what is stored in the card and they will be resigned.

From then on, every newly created repository on the same machine will automatically use the shared masterkey stored on the smartcard.

When using a masterkeycard, the default signature expiration reduces from 30 days to 7 days. cvmfs_server resign needs to be run to renew the signature. It is recommended to run that daily from cron.

Repositories for Volatile Files¶

Repositories can be flagged as containing volatile files using the -v option:

cvmfs_server mkfs -v my.repo.name

When CernVM-FS clients perform a cache cleanup, they treat files from volatile repositories with priority. Such volatile repositories can be useful, for instance, for experiment conditions data.

Compression and Hash Algorithms¶

Files in the CernVM-FS repository data store are compressed and named according to their compressed content hash. The default settings use DEFLATE (zlib) for compression and SHA-1 for hashing.

CernVM-FS can optionally skip compression of files. This can be beneficial, for instance, if the repository is known to contain already compressed content, such as JPG images or compressed ROOT files. In order to disable compression, set CVMFS_COMPRESSION_ALGORITHM=none in the /etc/cvmfs/repositories.d/$repository/server.conf file. Client version >= 2.2 is required in order to read uncompressed files.

Instead of SHA-1, CernVM-FS can use RIPEMD-160 or SHAKE-128 (a variant of SHA-3 with 160 output bits) as hash algorithm. In general, we advise not to change the default. In future versions, the default might change from SHA-1 to SHAKE-128. In order to enforce the use of a specific hash algorithm, set CVMFS_HASH_ALGORITHM=sha1, CVMFS_HASH_ALGORITHM=rmd160, or CVMFS_HASH_ALGORITHM=shake128 in the server.conf file. Client version >= 2.1.18 is required for accessing repositories that use RIPEMD-160. Client version >= 2.2 is required for accessing repositories that use SHAKE-128.

Both compression and hash algorithm can be changed at any point during the repository life time. Existing content will remain untouched, new content will be processed with the new settings.

Confidential Repositories¶

Repositories can be created with the -V options or republished with the -F option with a membership requirement. Clients that mount repositories with a membership requirement will grant or deny access to the repository based on the decision made by an authorization helper. See Section Authorization Helpers for details on authorization helpers.

For instance, a repository can be configured to grant access to a repository only to those users that have a X.509 certificate with a certain DN. Note that the corresponding client-side X.509 authorization helper is not part of CernVM-FS but is provided as a third-party plugin by the Open Science Grid.

A membership requirement makes most sense if the repository is served by an HTTPS server that requires client-side authentication. Note that such repositories cannot be replicated to Stratum 1 servers. Such repositories also cannot benefit from site proxies. Instead, such repositories are either part of a (non CernVM-FS) HTTPS content distribution network or they might be installed for a small number of users that, for example, require access to licensed software.

S3 Compatible Storage Systems¶

CernVM-FS can store files directly to S3 compatible storage systems, such as Amazon S3, Huawei UDS and OpenStack SWIFT. The S3 storage settings are given as parameters to cvmfs_server mkfs or cvmfs_server add-replica:

cvmfs_server mkfs -s /etc/cvmfs/.../mys3.conf \
  -w http://s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket my.repo.name

The file “mys3.conf” contains the S3 settings (see :ref: table below <tab_s3confparameters>). The “-w” option is used define the S3 server URL, e.g. http://localhost:3128, which is used for accessing the repository’s backend storage on S3. Note that this URL can be different than the S3 server address that is used for uploads, e.g. if a proxy server is deployed in front of the server. Note that the buckets need to exist before the repository is created. In the example above, a single bucket mybucket needs to be created beforehand. Depending on the S3 implementation (e.g. Minio), buckets may be private by default, in which case it’s necessary to make them public.

Parameter	Meaning
`CVMFS_S3_ACCOUNTS`	Number of S3 accounts to be used, e.g. 1. With some S3 servers use of multiple accounts can increase the upload speed significantly
`CVMFS_S3_ACCESS_KEY`	S3 account access key(s) separated with `:`, e.g. KEY-A:KEY-B:…
`CVMFS_S3_SECRET_KEY`	S3 account secret key(s) separated with `:`, e.g. KEY-A:KEY-B:…
`CVMFS_S3_BUCKETS_PER_ACCOUNT`	S3 buckets used per account, e.g. 1. With some S3 servers use of multiple buckets can increase the upload speed significantly
`CVMFS_S3_HOST`	S3 server hostname, e.g. s3.amazonaws.com. The hostname should NOT be prefixed by “http://”
`CVMFS_S3_PORT`	The port on which the S3 instance is running
`CVMFS_S3_BUCKET`	S3 bucket base name. Account and bucket index are appended to the bucket base name, e.g. `mybucket-2-3`. If you use just one account and one bucket, e.g. named `mybucket`, then you need to create only one bucket called `mybucket`
`CVMFS_S3_MAX_NUMBER_OF_PARALLEL_CONNECTIONS`	Number of parallel uploads to the S3 server, e.g. 400

In addition, if the S3 backend is configured to use multiple accounts or buckets, a proxy server is needed to map HTTP requests to correct buckets. This mapping is needed because CernVM-FS does not support buckets but assumes that all files are stored in a flat namespace. The recommendation is to use a Squid proxy server (version $\geq 3.1.10$). The squid.conf can look like this:

http_access allow all
http_port 127.0.0.1:3128 intercept
cache_peer swift.cern.ch parent 80 0 no-query originserver
url_rewrite_program /usr/bin/s3_squid_rewrite.py
cache deny all

The bucket mapping logic is implemented in s3_squid_rewrite.py file. This script is not provided by CernVM-FS but needs to be written by the repository owner (the CernVM-FS Git repository contains an example). The script needs to read requests from stdin and write mapped URLs to stdout, for instance:

in: http://localhost:3128/data/.cvmfswhitelist
out: http://swift.cern.ch/cernbucket-9-91/data/.cvmfswhitelist

Repository Update¶

Typically a repository publisher does the following steps in order to create a new revision of a repository:

Run cvmfs_server transaction to switch to a copy-on-write enabled CernVM-FS volume
Make the necessary changes to the repository, add new directories, patch certain binaries, …
Test the software installation
Do one of the following:
- Run cvmfs_server publish to finalize the new repository revision or
- Run cvmfs_server abort to clear all changes and start over again

CernVM-FS supports having more than one repository on a single server machine. In case of a multi-repository host, the target repository of a command needs to be given as a parameter when running the cvmfs_server utility. Most cvmfs_server commands allow for wildcards to do manipulations on more than one repository at once, cvmfs_server migrate *.cern.ch would migrate all present repositories ending with .cern.ch.

Repository Update Propagation¶

Updates to repositories won’t immediately appear on the clients. For scalability reasons, clients will only regularly check for updates. The frequency of update checks is stored in the repository itself and defaults to 4 minutes. The default can be changed by setting CVMFS_REPOSITORY_TTL in the /etc/cvmfs/repositories.d/$repository/server.conf file to a new value given in seconds. The value should not fall below 1 minute.

If the repository is replicated to a stratum 1 server (see Chapter Setting up a Replica Server (Stratum 1)), replication of the changes needs to finish before the repository time-to-live applies. The status of the replication can be checked by the cvmfs_info utility, like

cvmfs_info http://cvmfs-stratum-zero.cern.ch/cvmfs/cernvm-prod.cern.ch

The cvmfs_info utility can be downloaded as a stand-alone Perl script from the linked github repository.

The cvmfs_info utility relies on the repository meta-data as described in Chapter CernVM-FS Server Meta Information. It shows timestamp and revision number of the repository on the stratum 0 master server and all replicas, as well as the remaining life time of the repository whitelist and the catalog time-to-live.

Note: The cvmfs_info utility queries stratum servers without passing through web proxies. It is not meant to be used on a large-scale by all clients. On clients, the extended attribute revision can be used to check for the currently active repository state, like

attr -g revision /cvmfs/cernvm-prod.cern.ch

Grafting Files¶

When a repository is updated, new files are checksummed and copied / uploaded to a directory exported to the web. There are situations where this is not optimal - particularly, when “large-scale” repositories are used, it may not be pragmatic to copy every file to a single host. In these cases, it is possible to “graft” files by creating a special file containing the necessary publication data. When a graft is encountered, the file is published as if it was present on the repository machine: the repository admin is responsible for making sure the file’s data is distributed accordingly.

To graft a file, foo to a directory, one must: - Create an empty, zero-length file named foo in the directory. - Create a separate graft-file named .cvmfsgraft-foo in the same directory.

The .cvmfsgraft file must have the following format:

size=$SIZE
checksum=$CHECKSUM
chunk_offsets=$OFFSET_1,$OFFSET_2,$OFFSET_3,...
chunk_checksums=$CHECKSUM_1,$CHECKSUM_2,$CHECKSUM_3,...

Here, $SIZE is the entire file size and $CHECKSUM is the file’s checksum; the checksums used by this file are assumed to correspond to the algorithm selected at publication time. The offsets $OFFSET_X and checksums $CHECKSUM_X correspond to the checksum and beginning offset of each chunk in the file. $OFFSET_1 is always at 0. Implicitly, the last chunk ends at the end of the file.

To help generate checksum files, the cvmfs_swissknife graft command is provided. The graft command takes the following options:

Option	Description
`-i`	Input file to process (`-` for reading from stdin)
`-o`	Output location for graft file (optional)
`-v`	Verbose output (optional)
`-Z`	Compression algorithm (default: none) (optional)
`-c`	Chunk size (in MB; default: 32) (optional)
`-a`	hash algorithm (default: `SHA-1`) (optional)

This command outputs both the .cvmfsgraft file and and zero-length “real” file if -o is used; otherwise, it prints the contents of the .cvmfsgraft file to stdout. A typical invocation would look like this:

cat /path/to/some/file | cvmfs_swissknife graft -i - -o /cvmfs/repo.example.com/my_file

Variant Symlinks¶

It may be convenient to have a symlink in the repository resolve based on the CVMFS client configuration; this is called a variant symlink. For example, in the oasis.opensciencegrid.org repository, the OSG provides a default set of CAs at /cvmfs/oasis.opensciencegrid.org/mis/certificates but would like to give the sysadmin the ability to override this with their own set of CA certificates.

To setup a variant symlink in your repository, create a symlink as follows inside a repository transaction:

ln -s '$(OSG_CERTIFICATES)' /cvmfs/oasis.opensciencegrid.org/mis/certificates

Here, the certificates symlink will evaluate to the value of the OSG_CERTIFICATES configuration variable in the client. If OSG_CERTIFICATES is not provided, the symlink resolution will be an empty string. To provide a server-side default value, you can instead do:

ln -s '$(OSG_CERTIFICATES:-/cvmfs/oasis.opensciencegrid.org/mis/certificates-real)' /cvmfs/oasis.opensciencegrid.org/mis/certificates

Here, the symlink will evaluate to /cvmfs/oasis.opensciencegrid.org/mis/certificates-real by default unless the sysadmin sets OSG_CERTIFICATES in a configuration file (such as /etc/cvmfs/config.d/oasis.opensciencegrid.org.local.

Repository Import¶

The CernVM-FS server tools support the import of a CernVM-FS file storage together with its corresponding signing keychain. The import functionality is useful to bootstrap a release manager machine for a given file storage.

cvmfs_server import works similar to cvmfs_server mkfs (described in Repository Creation) except it uses the provided data storage instead of creating a fresh (and empty) storage. In case of a CernVM-FS 2.0 file storage cvmfs_server import also takes care of the file catalog migration into the latest catalog schema (see Legacy Repository Import for details).

During the import it might be necessary to resign the repository’s whitelist. Usually because the whitelist’s expiry date has exceeded. This operations requires the corresponding masterkey to be available in /etc/cvmfs/keys or in a masterkeycard. Resigning is enabled by adding -r to cvmfs_server import.

An import can either use a provided repository keychain placed into /etc/cvmfs/keys or generate a fresh repository key and certificate for the imported repository. The latter case requires an update of the repository’s whitelist to incorporate the newly generated repository key. To generate a fresh repository key add -t -r to cvmfs_server import.

Refer to Section Repository Signature for a comprehensive description of the repository signature mechanics.

Legacy Repository Import¶

We strongly recommend to install CernVM-FS 2.1 on a fresh or at least a properly cleaned machine without any traces of the CernVM-FS 2.0 installation before installing CernVM-FS 2.1 server tools.

The command cvmfs_server import requires the full CernVM-FS 2.0 data storage which is located at /srv/cvmfs by default as well as the repository’s signing keys. Since the CernVM-FS 2.1 server backend supports multiple repositories in contrast to its 2.0 counterpart, we recommend to move the repository’s data storage to /srv/cvmfs/<FQRN> upfront to avoid later inconsistencies.

The following steps describe the transformation of a repository from CernVM-FS 2.0 into 2.1. As an example we are using a repository called legacy.cern.ch.

Make sure that you have backups of both the repository’s backend storage and its signing keys
Install and test the CernVM-FS 2.1 server tools on the machine that is going to be used as new Stratum 0 maintenance machine
Place the repository’s backend storage data in /srv/cvmfs/legacy.cern.ch

(default storage location)
Transfer the repository’s signing keychain to the machine (f.e. to /legacy_keys/)

Run cvmfs_server import like this:

cvmfs_server import
  -o <username of repo maintainer> \
  -k ~/legacy_keys \
  -l               \ # for 2.0.x file catalog migration
  -s               \ # for further repository statistics
  legacy.cern.ch

Check the imported repository with cvmfs_server check legacy.cern.ch for integrity (see Integrity Check)

Customizable Actions Using Server Hooks¶

The cvmfs_server utility allows release managers to trigger custom actions before and after crucial repository manipulation steps. This can be useful for example for logging purposes, establishing backend storage connections automatically or other workflow triggers, depending on the application.

There are six designated server hooks that are potentially invoked during the repository update procedure:

When running cvmfs_server transaction:
- before the given repository is transitioned into transaction mode
- after the transition was successful
When running cvmfs_server publish:
- before the publish procedure for the given repository is started
- after it was published and remounted successfully
When running cvmfs_server abort:
- before the unpublished changes will be erased for the given repository
- after the repository was successfully reverted to the last published state

All server hooks must be defined in a single shell script file called:

/etc/cvmfs/cvmfs_server_hooks.sh

The cvmfs_server utility will check the existence of this script and source it. To subscribe to the described hooks one needs to define one or more of the following shell script functions:

transaction_before_hook()
transaction_after_hook()
publish_before_hook()
publish_after_hook()
abort_before_hook()
abort_after_hook()

The defined functions get called at the specified positions in the repository update process and are provided with the fully qualified repository name as their only parameter ($1). Undefined functions automatically default to a NO-OP. An example script is located at cvmfs/cvmfs_server_hooks.sh.demo in the CernVM-FS sources.

Maintaining a CernVM-FS Repository¶

CernVM-FS is a versioning, snapshot-based file system. Similar to versioning systems, changes to /cvmfs/…are temporary until they are committed (cvmfs_server publish) or discarded (cvmfs_server abort). That allows you to test and verify changes, for instance to test a newly installed release before publishing it to clients. Whenever changes are published (committed), a new file system snapshot of the current state is created. These file system snapshots can be tagged with a name, which makes them named snapshots. A named snapshot is meant to stay in the file system. One can rollback to named snapshots and it is possible, on the client side, to mount any of the named snapshots in lieu of the newest available snapshot.

Two named snapshots are managed automatically by CernVM-FS, trunk and trunk-previous. This allows for easy unpublishing of a mistake, by rolling back to the trunk-previous tag.

Integrity Check¶

CernVM-FS provides an integrity checker for repositories. It is invoked by

cvmfs_server check

The integrity checker verifies the sanity of file catalogs and verifies that referenced data chunks are present. Ideally, the integrity checker is used after every publish operation. Where this is not affordable due to the size of the repositories, the integrity checker should run regularly.

The checker can also run on a nested catalog subtree. This is useful to follow up a specific issue where a check on the full tree would take a lot of time:

cvmfs_server check -s <path to nested catalog mountpoint>

Optionally cvmfs_server check can also verify the data integrity (command line flag -i) of each data object in the repository. This is a time consuming process and we recommend it only for diagnostic purposes.

Named Snapshots¶

Named snapshots or tags are an easy way to organise checkpoints in the file system history. CernVM-FS clients can explicitly mount a repository at a specific named snapshot to expose the file system content published with this tag. It also allows for rollbacks to previously created and tagged file system revisions. Tag names need to be unique for each repository and are not allowed to contain spaces or spacial characters. Besides the actual tag’s name they can also contain a free descriptive text and store a creation timestamp.

Named snapshots are best to use for larger modifications to the repository, for instance when a new major software release is installed. Named snapshots provide the ability to easily undo modifications and to preserve the state of the file system for the future. Nevertheless, named snapshots should not be used excessively. Less than 50 named snapshots are a good number of named snapshots in many cases.

Automatically Generated Tags¶

By default, new repositories will automatically create a generic tag if no explicit tag is given during publish. The automatic tagging can be turned off using the -g option during repository creation or by setting CVMFS_AUTO_TAG=false in the /etc/cvmfs/repositories.d/$repository/server.conf file.

The life time of automatic tags can be restriced by the CVMFS_AUTO_TAG_TIMESPAN parameter or by the -G option to cvmfs_server mkfs. The parameter takes a string that the date utility can parse, for instance "4 weeks ago". On every publish, automatically generated tags older than the defined threshold are removed.

Creating a Named Snapshot¶

Tags can be added while publishing a new file system revision. To do so, the -a and -m options for cvmfs_server publish are used. The following command publishes a CernVM-FS revision with a new revision that is tagged as “release-1.0”:

cvmfs_server transaction
# Changes
cvmfs_server publish -a release-1.0 -m "first stable release"

Managing Existing Named Snapshots¶

Management of existing tags is done by using the cvmfs_server tag command. Without any command line parameters, it will print all currently available named snapshots. Snapshots can be inspected (-i <tag name>), removed (-r <tag name>) or created (-a <tag name> -m <tag description> -h <catalog root hash>). Furthermore machine readable modes for both listing (-l -x) as well as inspection (-i <tag name> -x) is available.

Rollbacks¶

A repository can be rolled back to any of the named snapshots. Rolling back is achieved through the command cvmfs_server rollback -t release-1.0 A rollback is, like restoring from backups, not something one would do often. Use caution, a rollback is irreversible.

Named Snapshot Diffs¶

The command cvmfs_server diff shows the difference in terms of added, deleted, and modified files and directories between any two named snapshots. It also shows the difference in total number of files and nested catalogs.

Unless named snapshots are provided by the -s and -d flags, the command shows the difference from the last snapshot (“trunk-previous”) to the current one (“trunk”).

Instant Access to Named Snapshots¶

CernVM-FS can maintain a special directory

/cvmfs/${repository_name}/.cvmfs/snapshots

through which the contents of all named snapshots is accessible by clients. The directory is enabled and disabled by setting CVMFS_VIRTUAL_DIR=[true,false]. If enabled, for every named snapshot $tag_name a directory /cvmfs/${repository_name}/.cvmfs/snapshots/${tag_name} is maintained, which contains the contents of the repository in the state referenced by the snapshot.

To prevent accidental recursion, the top-level directory .cvmfs is hidden by CernVM-FS clients >= 2.4 even for operations that show dot-files like ls -a. Clients before version 2.4 will show the .cvmfs directory but they cannot recurse into the named snapshot directories.

Branching¶

In certain cases, one might need to publish a named snapshot based not on the latest revision but based on a previous named snapshot. This can be useful, for instance, if versioned data sets are stored in CernVM-FS and certain files in a past data set needs to be fixed.

In order to publish a branch, use cvmfs_server checkout in order to switch to the desired parent branch before starting a transaction. The following example publishes based on the existing snapshot “data-v201708” the new named snapshot “data-v201708-fix01” in the branch “fixes_data-v201708”.

cvmfs_server checkout -b fixes_data-v201708 -t data-v201708
cvmfs_server transaction
# show that the repository is in a checked-out state
cvmfs_server list
# make changes to /cvmfs/${repository_name}
cvmfs_server publish -a data-v201708-fix01
# show all named snapshots and their branches
cvmfs_server tag -l
# verify that the repository is back on the trunk revision
cvmfs_server list

When publishing a checked out state, it is mandatory to specify a tag name. Later, it might be necessary to publish another set of fixes in the same branch. To do so, the command cvmfs_server checkout -b fixes_data-v201708 checks out the latest named snapshot from the given branch. The command cvmfs_server checkout jumps back to the trunk of the repository.

Branching makes most sense for repositories that use the instant snapshot access (see Section Branching).

Please note that while CernVM-FS supports branching, it does not support merging of repository snapshots.

Managing Nested Catalogs¶

CernVM-FS stores meta-data (path names, file sizes, …) in file catalogs. When a client accesses a repository, it has to download the file catalog first and then it downloads the files as they are opened. A single file catalog for an entire repository can quickly become large and impractical. Also, clients typically do not need all of the repository’s meta-data at the same time. For instance, clients using software release 1.0 do not need to know about the contents of software release 2.0.

With nested catalogs, CernVM-FS has a mechanism to partition the directory tree of a repository into many catalogs. Repository maintainers are responsible for sensible cutting of the directory trees into nested catalogs. They can do so by creating and removing magic files named .cvmfscatalog.

For example, in order to create a nested catalog for software release 1.0 in the hypothetical repository experiment.cern.ch, one would invoke

cvmfs_server transaction
touch /cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/1.0/.cvmfscatalog
cvmfs_server publish

In order to merge a nested catalog with its parent catalog, the corresponding .cvmfscatalog file needs to be removed. Nested catalogs can be nested on arbitrary many levels.

Recommendations for Nested Catalogs¶

Nested catalogs should be created having in mind which files and directories are accessed together. This is typically the case for software releases, but can be also on the directory level that separates platforms. For instance, for a directory layout like

/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch
  |- /software
  |    |- /i686
  |    |    |- 1.0
  |    |    |- 2.0
  |    `    |- common
  |    |- /x86_64
  |    |    |- 1.0
  |    `    |- common
  |- /grid-certificates
  |- /scripts

it makes sense to have nested catalogs at

/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/i686
/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/x86_64
/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/i686/1.0
/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/i686/2.0
/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/x86_64/1.0

A nested catalog at the top level of each software package release is generally the best approach because once package releases are installed they tend to never change, which reduces churn and garbage generated in the repository from old catalogs that have changed. In addition, each run only tends to access one version of any package so having a separate catalog per version avoids loading catalog information that will not be used. A nested catalog at the top level of each platform may make sense if there is a significant number of platform-specific files that aren’t included in other catalogs.

It could also make sense to have a nested catalog under grid-certificates, if the certificates are updated much more frequently than the other directories. It would not make sense to create a nested catalog under /cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/i686/common, because this directory needs to be accessed anyway whenever its parent directory is needed. As a rule of thumb, a single file catalog should contain more than 1000 files and directories but not contain more than $\approx$200000 files. See Inspecting Nested Catalog Structure how to find catalogs that do not satisfy this recommendation.

Restructuring the repository’s directory tree is an expensive operation in CernVM-FS. Moreover, it can easily break client applications when they switch to a restructured file system snapshot. Therefore, the software directory tree layout should be relatively stable before filling the CernVM-FS repository.

Managing Nested Catalogs with `.cvmfsdirtab`¶

Rather than managing .cvmfscatalog files by hand, a repository administrator may create a file called .cvmfsdirtab, in the top directory of the repository, which contains a list of paths relative to the top of the repository where .cvmfscatalog files will be created. Those paths may contain shell wildcards such as asterisk (*) and question mark (?). This is useful for specifying patterns for creating nested catalogs as new files are installed. A very good use of the patterns is to identify directories where software releases will be installed.

In addition, lines in .cvmfsdirtab that begin with an exclamation point (!) are shell patterns that will be excluded from those matched by lines without an exclamation point. For example a .cvmfsdirtab might contain these lines for the repository of the previous subsection:

/software/*
/software/*/*
! */common
/grid-certificates

This will create nested catalogs at

/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/i686
/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/i686/1.0
/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/i686/2.0
/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/x86_64
/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/software/x86_64/1.0
/cvmfs/experiment.cern.ch/grid-certificates

Note that unlike the regular lines that add catalogs, asterisks in the exclamation point exclusion lines can span the slashes separating directory levels.

Automatic Management of Nested Catalogs¶

An alternative to .cvmfsdirtab is the automatic catalog generation. This feature automatically generates nested catalogs based on their weight (number of entries). It can be enabled by setting CVMFS_AUTOCATALOGS=true in the server configuration file.

Catalogs are split when their weight is greater than a specified maximum threshold, or removed if their weight is less than a minimum threshold. Automatically generated catalogs contain a .cvmfsautocatalog file (along with the .cvmfscatalog file) in its root directory. User-defined catalogs (containing only a .cvmfscatalog file) always remain untouched. Hence one can mix both manual and automatically managed directory sub-trees.

The following conditions are applied when processing a nested catalog:

If the weight is greater than CVMFS_AUTOCATALOGS_MAX_WEIGHT, this catalog will be split in smaller catalogs that meet the maximum and minimum thresholds.
If the weight is less than CVMFS_AUTOCATALOGS_MIN_WEIGHT, this catalog will be merged into its parent.

Both CVMFS_AUTOCATALOGS_MAX_WEIGHT and CVMFS_AUTOCATALOGS_MIN_WEIGHT have reasonable defaults and usually do not need to be defined by the user.

Inspecting Nested Catalog Structure¶

The following command visualizes the current nested file catalog layout of a repository.

cvmfs_server list-catalogs

Additionally this command allows to spot degenerated nested catalogs. As stated here the recommended maximal file entry count of a single catalog should not exceed $\approx$200000. One can use the switch list-catalogs -e to inspect the current nested catalog entry counts in the repository. Furthermore list-catalgos -s will print the file sizes of the catalogs in bytes.

Repository Mount Point Management¶

CernVM-FS server maintains two mount points for each repository (see CernVM-FS Server Infrastructure for details) and needs to keep them in sync with transactional operations on the repository.

In rare occasions (for example at reboot of a release manager machine) CernVM-FS might need to perform repair operations on those mount points. As of CernVM-FS 2.2.0 those mount points are not automatically mounted on reboot of the release manager machine anymore. Usually the mount point handling happens automatically and transparently to the user when invoking arbitrary cvmfs_server commands.

Nevertheless cvmfs_server mount <repo name> allows users to explicitly trigger this repair operation anytime for individual repositories. Mounting all hosted repositories is possible with the -a parameter but requires root privileges. If you want to have all hosted repositories mounted after reboot then put cvmfs_server mount -a in a boot script, for example in /etc/rc.local.

# properly mount a specific repository
cvmfs_server mount test.cern.ch

# properly mount all hosted repositories (as root)
sudo cvmfs_server mount -a

Syncing files into a repository with cvmfs_rsync¶

A common method of publishing into CernVM-FS is to first install all the files into a convenient shared filesystem, mount the shared filesystem on the publishing machine, and then sync the files into the repository during a transaction. The most common tool to do the syncing is rsync, but rsync by itself doesn’t have a convenient mechanism for avoiding generated .cvmfscatalog and .cvmfsautocatalog files in the CernVM-FS repository. Actually the --exclude option is good for avoiding the extra files, but the problem is that if a source directory tree is removed, then rsync will not remove the corresponding copy of the directory tree in the repository if it contains a catalog, because the extra file remains in the repository. For this reason, a tool called cvmfs_rsync is included in the cvmfs-server package. This is a small wrapper around rsync that adds the --exclude options and removes .cvmfscatalog and .cvmfsautocatalog files from a repository when the corresponding source directory is removed. This is the usage:

cvmfs_rsync [rsync_options] srcdir /cvmfs/reponame[/destsubdir]

This is an example use case:

$ cvmfs_rsync -av --delete /data/lhapdf /cvmfs/cms.cern.ch

Migrate File Catalogs¶

In rare cases the further development of CernVM-FS makes it necessary to change the internal structure of file catalogs. Updating the CernVM-FS installation on a Stratum 0 machine might require a migration of the file catalogs.

It is recommended that cvmfs_server list is issued after any CernVM-FS update to review if any of the maintained repositories need a migration. Outdated repositories will be marked as “INCOMPATIBLE” and cvmfs_server refuses all actions on these repositories until the file catalogs have been updated.

In order to run a file catalog migration use cvmfs_server migrate for each of the outdated repositories. This will essentially create a new repository revision that contains the exact same file structure as the current revision. However, all file catalogs will be recreated from scratch using the updated internal structure. Note that historic file catalogs of all previous repository revisions stay untouched and are not migrated.

After cvmfs_server migrate has successfully updated all file catalogs repository maintenance can continue as usual.

Change File Ownership on File Catalog Level¶

CernVM-FS tracks the UID and GID of all contained files and exposes them through the client to all using machines. Repository maintainers should keep this in mind and plan their UID and GID assignments accordingly.

Repository operation might occasionally require to bulk-change many or all UIDs/GIDs. While this is of course possible via chmod -R in a normal repository transaction, it is cumbersome for large repositories. We provide a tool to quickly do such adaption on CernVM-FS catalog level using UID and GID mapping files:

cvmfs_server catalog-chown -u <uid map> -g <gid map> <repo name>

Both the UID and GID map contain a list of rules to apply to each file meta data record in the CernVM-FS catalogs. This is an example of such a rules list:

# map root UID/GID to 1001
0 1001

# swap UID/GID 1002 and 1003
1002 1003
1003 1002

# map everything else to 1004
* 1004

Note that running cvmfs_server catalog-chown produces a new repository revision containing CernVM-FS catalogs with updated UIDs and GIDs according to the provided rules. Thus, previous revisions of the CernVM-FS repository will not be affected by this update.

Repository Garbage Collection¶

Since CernVM-FS is a versioning file system it is following an insert-only policy regarding its backend storage. When files are deleted from a CernVM-FS repository, they are not automatically deleted from the underlying storage. Therefore legacy revisions stay intact and usable forever (cf. Named Snapshots) at the expense of an ever-growing storage volume both on the Stratum 0 and the Stratum 1s.

For this reason, applications that frequently install files into a repository and delete older ones - for example the output from nightly software builds - might quickly fill up the repository’s backend storage. Furthermore these applications might actually never make use of the aforementioned long-term revision preservation rendering most of the stored objects “garbage”.

CernVM-FS supports garbage-collected repositories that automatically remove unreferenced data objects and free storage space. This feature needs to be enabled on the Stratum 0 and automatically scans the repository’s catalog structure for unreferenced objects both on the Stratum 0 and the Stratum 1 installations on every publish respectively snapshot operation.

Garbage Sweeping Policy¶

The garbage collector of CernVM-FS is using a mark-and-sweep algorithm to detect unused files in the internal catalog graph. Revisions that are referenced by named snapshots (cf. Named Snapshots) or that are recent enough are preserved while all other revisions are condemned to be removed. By default this time-based threshold is three days but can be changed using the configuration variable CVMFS_AUTO_GC_TIMESPAN both on Stratum 0 and Stratum 1. The value of this variable is expected to be parseable by the date command, for example 3 days ago or 1 week ago.

Enabling Garbage Collection¶

Creating a Garbage Collectable Repository¶

Repositories can be created as garbage-collectable from the start by adding -z to the cvmfs_server mkfs command (cf. Repository Creation). It is generally recommended to also add -g to switch off automatic tagging in a garbage collectable repository. For debugging or bookkeeping it is possible to log deleted objects into a file by setting CVMFS_GC_DELETION_LOG to a writable file path.

Enabling Garbage Collection on an Existing Repository (Stratum 0)¶

Existing repositories can be reconfigured to be garbage collectable by adding CVMFS_GARBAGE_COLLECTION=true and CVMFS_AUTO_GC=true to the server.conf of the repository. Furthermore it is recommended to switch off automatic tagging by setting CVMFS_AUTO_TAG=false for a garbage collectable repository. The garbage collection will be enabled with the next published transaction and will run after every publish operation. Alternatively, CVMFS_AUTO_GC=false may be set and cvmfs_server gc run from cron at a time when no publish operations will be happening; garbage collection and publish operations cannot happen at the same time.

Enabling Garbage Collection on an Existing Replication (Stratum 1)¶

In order to use automatic garbage collection on a stratum 1 replica, set CVMFS_AUTO_GC=true in the server.conf file of the stratum 1 installation. This will run the garbage collection after every snapshot, and will only work if the upstream stratum 0 repository has garbage collection enabled.

Alternatively, cvmfs_server gc -af can be run from cron periodically (e.g. daily) to run garbage collection on all repositories that have garbage collection enabled on the stratum 0. Logs will go into /var/log/cvmfs/gc.log.

Limitations on Repository Content¶

Because CernVM-FS provides what appears to be a POSIX filesystem to clients, it is easy to think that it is a general purpose filesystem and that it will work well with all kinds of files. That is not the case, however, because CernVM-FS is optimized for particular types of files and usage. This section contains guidelines for limitations on the content of repositories for best operation.

Data files¶

First and foremost, CernVM-FS is designed to distribute executable code that is shared between a large number of jobs that run together at grid sites, clouds, or clusters. Worker node cache sizes and web proxy bandwidth are generally engineered to accommodate that application. The total amount read per job is expected to be roughly limited by the amount of RAM per job slot. The same files are also expected to be read from the worker node cache multiple times for the same type of job, and read from a caching web proxy by multiple worker nodes.

If there are data files distributed by CernVM-FS that follow similar access patterns and size limits as executable code, it will probably work fine. In addition, if there are files that are larger but read slowly throughout long jobs, as opposed to all at once at the beginning, that can also work well if the same files are read by many jobs. That is because web proxies have to be engineered for handling bursts at the beginning of jobs and so they tend to be lightly loaded a majority of the time.

In general, a good rule of thumb is to calculate the maximum rate at which jobs typically start and limit the amount of data that might be read from a web proxy to per thousand jobs, assuming a reasonable amount of overlap of jobs onto the same worker nodes. Also, limit the amount of data that will be put into any one worker node cache to . Of course, if you have a special arrangement with particular sites to have large caches and bandwidths available, these limits can be made higher at those sites. Web proxies may also need to be engineered with faster disks if the data causes their cache hit ratios to be reduced.

If you need to publish files with much larger working set sizes than a typical software environment, refer to “large-scale” repositories document.

Also, keep in mind that the total amount of data distributed is not unlimited. The files are stored and distributed compressed, and files with the same content stored in multiple places in the same repository are collapsed to the same file in storage, but the storage space is used not only on the original repository server, it is also replicated onto multiple Stratum 1 servers. Generally if only executable code is distributed, there is no problem with the space taken on Stratum 1s, but if many large data files are distributed they may exceed the Stratum 1 storage capacity. Data files also tend to not compress as well, and that is especially the case of course if they are already compressed before installation.

Tarballs, zip files, and other archive files¶

If the contents of a tarball, zip file, or some other type of archive file is desired to be distributed by CernVM-FS, it is usually better to first unpack it into its separate pieces first. This is because it allows better sharing of content between multiple releases of the file; some pieces inside the archive file might change and other pieces might not in the next release, and pieces that don’t change will be stored as the same file in the repository. CernVM-FS will compress the content of the individual pieces, so even if there’s no sharing between releases it shouldn’t take much more space.

File permissions¶

Care should be taken to make all the files in a repository readable by “other”. This is because permissions on files in the original repository are generally the same as those seen by end clients, except the files are owned by the “cvmfs” user and group. The write permissions are ignored by the client since it is a read-only filesystem. However, unless the client has set

CVMFS_CHECK_PERMISSIONS=no

(and most do not), unprivileged users will not be able to read files unless they are readable by “other” and all their parent directories have at least “execute” permissions. It makes little sense to publish files in CernVM-FS if they won’t be able to be read by anyone.

Hardlinks¶

By default CernVM-FS does not allow hardlinks of a file to be in different directories. If there might be any such hardlinks in a repository, set the option

CVMFS_IGNORE_XDIR_HARDLINKS=true

in the repository’s server.conf. The file will not appear to be hardlinked to the client, but it will still be stored as only one file in the repository just like any other files that have identical content. Note that if, in a subsequent publish operation, only one of these cross-directory hardlinks gets changed, the other hardlinks remain unchanged (the hardlink got “broken”).

Setting up a Replica Server (Stratum 1)¶

While a CernVM-FS Stratum 0 repository server is able to serve clients directly, a large number of clients is better be served by a set of Stratum 1 replica servers. Multiple Stratum 1 servers improve the reliability, reduce the load, and protect the Stratum 0 master copy of the repository from direct accesses. Stratum 0 server, Stratum 1 servers and the site-local proxy servers can be seen as content distribution network. The figure below shows the situation for the repositories hosted in the cern.ch domain.

Concept overview of the CernVM-FS Content Delivery Network

CernVM-FS content distribution network for the cern.ch domain: Stratum1 replica servers are located in Europe, the U.S. and Asia. One protected read/write instance (Stratum 0) is feeding up the public, distributed mirror servers. A distributed hierarchy of proxy servers fetches content from the closest public mirror server.

A Stratum 1 server is a standard web server that uses the CernVM-FS server toolkit to create and maintain a mirror of a CernVM-FS repository served by a Stratum 0 server. To this end, the cvmfs_server utility provides the add-replica command. This command will register the Stratum 0 URL and prepare the local web server. Periodical synchronization has to be scheduled, for instance with cron, using the cvmfs_server snapshot command. The advantage over general purpose mirroring tools such as rSync is that all CernVM-FS file integrity verifications mechanisms from the Fuse client are reused. Additionally, by the aid of the CernVM-FS file catalogs, the cvmfs_server utility knows beforehand (without remote listing) which files to transfer.

In order to prevent accidental synchronization from a repository, the Stratum 0 repository maintainer has to create a .cvmfs_master_replica file in the HTTP root directory. This file is created by default when a new repository is created. Note that replication can thrash caches that might exist between Stratum 1 and Stratum 0. A direct connection is therefore preferable.

Recommended Setup¶

The vast majority of HTTP requests will be served by the site’s local proxy servers. Being a publicly available service, however, we recommend to install a Squid frontend in front of the Stratum 1 web server.

We suggest the following key parameters:

Storage

RAID-protected storage. The cvmfs_server utility should have low latency to the storage because it runs a large number of system calls (stat()) against it. For the local storage backends ext3/4 filesystems are preferred (rather than XFS).

Web server

A standard Apache server. Directory listing is not required. In addition, it is a good practice to exclude search engines from the replica web server by an appropriate robots.txt. The webserver should be close to the storage in terms of latency.

Squid frontend

Squid should be used as a frontend to Apache, configured as a reverse proxy. It is recommended to run it on the same machine as Apache to reduce the number of points of failure. In that case caching can be disabled for the data (since there’s no need to store it again on the same disk), but caching is helpful for the geo api calls. Alternatively, separate Squid server machines may be configured in a round-robin DNS and each forward to the Apache server, but note that if any of them are down the entire service will be considered down by CernVM-FS clients. The Squid frontend should listen on ports 80 and 8000. The more RAM that the operating system can use for file system caching, the better.

Note: Port 8000 might be assigned to soundd. On SElinux systems, this assignment must be changed to the HTTP service by semanage port -m -t http_port_t -p tcp 8000. The cvmfs-server RPM for EL7 executes this command as a post-installation script.

DNS cache

A Stratum 1 does a lot of DNS lookups, so we recommend installing a DNS caching mechanism on the machine such as dnsmasq or bind. We do not recommend nscd since it does not honor the DNS Time-To-Live protocol.

Squid Configuration¶

The Squid configuration differs from the site-local Squids because the Stratum 1 Squid servers are transparent to the clients (reverse proxy). As the expiry rules are set by the web server, Squid cache expiry rules remain unchanged.

The following lines should appear accordingly in /etc/squid/squid.conf:

http_port 80 accel
http_port 8000 accel
http_access allow all
cache_peer <APACHE_HOSTNAME> parent <APACHE_PORT> 0 no-query originserver

cache_mem <MEM_CACHE_SIZE> MB
cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid <DISK_CACHE_SIZE in MB> 16 256
maximum_object_size 1024 MB
maximum_object_size_in_memory 128 KB

Note that http_access allow all has to be inserted before (or instead of) the line http_access deny all. If Apache is running on the same host, the APACHE_HOSTNAME will be localhost. Also, in that case there is not a performance advantage for squid to cache files that came from the same machine, so you can configure squid to not cache files. Do that with the following lines:

acl CVMFSAPI urlpath_regex ^/cvmfs/[^/]*/api/
cache deny !CVMFSAPI

Then the squid will only cache API calls. You can then set MEM_CACHE_SIZE and DISK_CACHE_SIZE quite small.

Check the configuration syntax by squid -k parse. Create the hard disk cache area with squid -z. In order to make the increased number of file descriptors effective for Squid, execute ulimit -n 8192 prior to starting the squid service.

Monitoring¶

The cvmfs_server utility reports status and problems to stdout and stderr.

For the web server infrastructure, we recommend standard Nagios HTTP checks. They should be configured with the URL http://$replica-server/cvmfs/$repository_name/.cvmfspublished. This file can also be used to monitor if the same repository revision is served by the Stratum 0 server and all the Stratum 1 servers. In order to tune the hardware and cache sizes, keep an eye on the Squid server’s CPU and I/O load.

Keep an eye on HTTP 404 errors. For normal CernVM-FS traffic, such failures should not occur. Traffic from CernVM-FS clients is marked by an X-CVMFS2 header.

CernVM-FS Server Meta Information¶

The CernVM-FS server automatically maintains both global and repository specifc meta information as JSON data. Release manager machines keep a list of hosted Stratum0 and Stratum1 repositories and user-defined administrative meta information.

Furthermore each repository contains user-maintained and signed meta information gets replicated to Stratum1 servers automatically.

Global Meta Information¶

This JSON data provides information about the CernVM-FS server itself. A list of all repositories (both Stratum0 and Stratum1) hosted at this specific server is automatically generated and can be accessed here:

http://<server base URL>/cvmfs/info/v1/repositories.json

Furthermore there might be user-defined information like the administrator’s name, contact information and an arbitrary user-defined JSON portion here:

http://<server base URL>/cvmfs/info/v1/meta.json

Using the cvmfs_server utility, an administrator can edit the user-defined portion of the data with a text editor (cf. $EDITOR)s:

cvmfs_server update-info

Note that the cvmfs_server package requires the jq utility, which validates CVMFS JSON data.

Below are examples of both the repository list and user-defined JSON files.

Repository Specific Meta Information¶

Each repository contains a JSON object with repository specific meta data. The information is maintained by the repository’s owner on the Stratum0 release manager machine. It contains the maintainer’s contact information, a description of the repository’s content, the recommended Stratum 0 URL and a list of recommended Stratum 1 replica URLs. Furthermore it provides a custom JSON region for arbitrary information.

Note that this JSON file is stored inside CernVM-FS’s backend data structure and gets replicated to Stratum1 servers automatically.

Editing is done per repository using the cvmfs_server utilitiy. As with the global meta information cvmfs_server uses jq to validate edited JSON information before storing it:

cvmfs_server update-repoinfo <repo name>

Besides the interactive editing (cf. $EDITOR) one can specify a file path that should be stored as the repository’s meta information:

cvmfs_server update-repoinfo -f <path to JSON file> <repo name>

An example of a repository specific meta information file can be found in the section below.

Examples¶

/cvmfs/info/v1/meta.json¶

{
  "administrator" : "Your Name",
  "email"         : "you@organisation.org",
  "organisation"  : "Your Organisation",

  "custom" : {
    "_comment" : "Put arbitrary structured data here"
  }
}

/cvmfs/info/v1/repositories.json¶

{
  "schema"       : 1,
  "repositories" : [
    {
      "name"  : "atlas.cern.ch",
      "url"   : "/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch"
    },
    {
      "name"  : "cms.cern.ch",
      "url"   : "/cvmfs/cms.cern.ch"
    }
  ],
  "replicas" : [
    {
      "name"  : "lhcb.cern.ch",
      "url"   : "/cvmfs/lhcb.cern.ch"
    }
  ]
}

Repository Specific Meta Information¶

{
  "administrator" : "Your Name",
  "email"         : "you@organisation.org",
  "organisation"  : "Your Organisation",
  "description"   : "Repository content",
  "url"           : "https://www.example.com/",
  "recommended-stratum0"  : "stratum 0 url",
  "recommended-stratum1s" : [ "stratum1 url", "stratum1 url" ],

  "custom" : {
    "_comment" : "Put arbitrary structured data here"
  }
}

Client Plug-Ins¶

The CernVM-FS client’s functionality can be extended through plug-ins. CernVM-FS plug-ins are binaries (processes) that communicate with the main client process through IPC. Currently there are two plug-in interfaces: cache manager plugins and authorization helpers.

Cache Plugins¶

A cache plugin provides the functionality of the client’s local cache directory: it maintains a set of content-addressed objects. Clients can read from these objects. Depending on its capabilities, a cache plugin might also support addition of new objects, listing objects and eviction of objects from the cache.

Cache plugins and clients exchange messages through a socket. The messages are serialized by the Google protobuf library. A description of the wire protocol can be found in the cvmfs/cache.proto source file, although the cache plugins should not directly implement the protocol. Instead, plugins are supposed to use the libcvmfs_cache library (part of the CernVM-FS development package), which takes care of the low-level protocol handling.

Good entry points into the development of a cache plugin are the demo plugin cvmfs/cache_plugin/cvmfs_cache_null.cc and the production in-memory cache plugin cvmfs/cache_plugin/cvmfs_cache_ram.cc. The CernVM-FS unit test suite has a unit test driver, cvmfs_test_cache, with a number of tests that are helpful for the development and debugging of a cache plugin.

Broadly speaking, a cache plugin process performs the following steps

#include <libcvmfs_cache.h>

cvmcache_init_global();
// Option parsing, which can use cvmcache_options_... functions to parse
// CernVM-FS client configuration files

// Optionally: spawning the watchdog to create stack traces when the cache
// plugin crashes
cvmcache_spawn_watchdog(NULL);

// Create a plugin context by passing function pointers to callbacks
struct cvmcache_context *ctx = cvmcache_init(&callbacks);

// Connect to the socket defined by the locator string
cvmcache_listen(ctx, locator);

// Spawn an I/O thread in which the callback functions are called
cvmcache_process_requests(ctx, 0);

// Depending on whether the plugin is started independently or by the
// CernVM-FS client, cvmcache_process_requests() termination behaves
// differently

if (!cvmcache_is_supervised()) {
  // Decide when the plugin should be terminated, e.g. wait for a signal
  cvmcache_terminate(ctx);
}

// Cleanup
cvmcache_wait_for(ctx);
cvmcache_terminate_watchdog();
cvmcache_cleanup_global();

The core of the cache plugin is the implementation of the callback functions provided to cvmcache_init(). Not all callback functions need to be implemented. Some can be set to NULL, which needs to correspond to the indicated plugin capabilities specified in the capabilities bit vector.

Basic Capabilities¶

Objects maintained by the cache plugin are identified by their content hash. Every cache plugin must be able to check whether a certain object is available or not and, if it is available, provide data from the object. This functionality is provided by the cvmcache_chrefcnt(), cvmcache_obj_info(), and cvmcache_pread() callbacks. With only this functionality, the cache plugin can be used as a read-only lower layer in a tiered cache but not as a stand-alone cache manager.

For a proper stand-alone cache manager, the plugin must keep reference counting for its objects. The concept of reference counting is borrowed from link counts in UNIX file systems. Every object in a cache plugin has a reference counter that indicates how many times the object is being in use by CernVM-FS clients. For objects in use, clients expect that reading succeeds, i.e. objects in use must not be deleted.

Adding Objects¶

On a cache miss, clients need to populate the cache with the missing object. To do so, cache plugins provide a transactional write interface. The upload of an object results in the following call chain:

A call to cvmcache_start_txn() with a given transaction id

Zero, one, or multiple calls to cvmcache_write_txn() that append data

A call to cvmcache_commit_txn() ro cvmcache_abort_txn()

Only after commit the object must be accessible for reading. Multiple concurrent transactions on the same object are possible. After commit, the reference counter of the object needs to be equal to the number of transactions that committed the object (usually 1).

Listing and Cache Space Management¶

Listing of the objects in the cache and the ability to evict objects from the cache are optional capabilities. Only objects whose reference counter is zero may be evicted. Clients can keep file catalogs open for a long time, thereby preventing them from being evicted. To mitigate that fact, cache plugins can at any time send a notification to clients using cvmcache_ask_detach(), asking them to close as many nested catalogs as they can.

Authorization Helpers¶

Client authorization helpers (authz helper) can be used to grant or deny read access to a mounted repository. To do so, authorization helpers can verify the local UNIX user (uid/gid) and the process id (pid) that is issuing a file system request.

An authz helper is spawned by CernVM-FS if the root file catalog contains membership requirement (see below). The binary to be spawned is derived from the membership requirement but it can be overwritten with the CVMFS_AUTHZ_HELPER parameter. The authz helper listens for commands on stdin and it replies on stdout.

Grant/deny decisions are typically cached for a while by the client. Note that replies are cached for the entire session (session id) that contains the calling process id.

Membership Requirement¶

The root file catalog of a repository determines if and which authz helper should be used by a client. The membership requirement (also called VOMS authorization) can be set, unset, and changed when creating a repository and on every publish operation. It has the form

<helper>%<membership string>

The <helper> component helps the client find an authz helper. The client searches for a binary ${CVMFS_AUTHZ_SEARCH_PATH}/cvmfs_helper_<helper>. By default, the search path is /usr/libexec/cvmfs/authz. CernVM-FS comes with two helpers: cvmfs_helper_allow and cvmfs_helper_deny. Both helpers make static decisions and disregard the membership string. Other helpers can use the membership string to specify user groups that are allowed to access a repository.

Authz Helper Protocol¶

The authz helper gets spawned by the CernVM-FS client with stdin and stdout connected. There is a command/reply style of messages. Messages have a 4 byte version (=1), a 4 byte length, and then a JSON text that needs to contain the top-level struct cvmfs_authz_v1 { ... }. Communication starts with a handshake where the client passes logging parameters to the authz helper. The client then sends zero or more authorization requests, each of which is answered by a positive or negative permit. A positive permit can include an access token that should be used to download data. The permits are cached by the client with a TTL that the helper can chose. On unmount, the client sends a quit command to the helper.

When spawned, the authz helper’s environment is prepopulated with all CVMFS_AUTHZ_... environment variables that are in the CernVM-FS client’s environment. Furthermore the parameter CVMFS_AUTHZ_HELPER=yes is set.

The JSON snippet of every message contains msgid and revision integer fields. The revision is currently 0 and unused. Message ids indicate certain other fields that can or should be present. Additional JSON text is ignored. The message id can be one of the following

Code	Meaning
0	Cvmfs: “Hello, helper, are you there?” (handshake)
1	Helper: “Yes, cvmfs, I’m here” (handshake reply)
2	Cvmfs: “Please verify, helper” (verification request)
3	Helper: “I verified, cvmfs, here’s the result” (permit)
4	Cvmfs: “Please shutdown, helper” (termination)

Handshake and Termination¶

In the JSON snippet of the hand shake, the CernVM-FS client transmits the fully qualified repository name (fqrn string field) and the syslog facility and syslog level the helper is supposed to use (syslog_facility, syslog_level integer fields). The handshake reply as well as the termination have no additional payload.

Verification Requests¶

A verification request contains the uid, gid, and pid of the calling process (uid, gid, pid integer fields). It furthermore contains the Base64 encoded membership string from the membership requirement (membership string field).

The permit has to contain a status indicating success or failure (status integer field) and a time to live for this reply in seconds (ttl integer field). The status can be one of the following

Code	Meaning
0	Success (allow access)
1	Authentication token of the user not found (deny access)
2	Invalid authentication token (deny access)
3	User is not member of the required groups (deny access)

On success, the permit can optionally conatain a Base64 encoded version of an X.509 proxy certificate (x509_proxy string field). This certificate is used by the CernVM-FS client when downloading nested catalogs files as client-side HTTPS authentication certificate.

Implementation Notes¶

CernVM-FS has a modular structure and relies on several open source libraries. Figure below shows the internal building blocks of CernVM-FS. Most of these libraries are shipped with the CernVM-FS sources and are linked statically in order to facilitate debugging and to keep the system dependencies minimal.

File Catalog¶

A CernVM-FS repository is defined by its file catalog. The file catalog is an SQLite database [Allen10] having a single table that lists files and directories together with its metadata. The table layout is shown in the table below:

Field	Type
Path MD5	128Bit Integer
Parent Path MD5	128Bit Integer
Hardlinks	Integer
Content Hash	BLOB
Size	Integer
Mode	Integer
Last Modified	Timestamp
Flags	Integer
Name	String
Symlink	String
uid	Integer
gid	Integer
xattr	BLOB

In order to save space we do not store absolute paths. Instead we store MD5 [Rivest92], [Turner11] hash values of the absolute path names. Symbolic links are kept in the catalog. Symbolic links may contain environment variables in the form $(VAR_NAME) or $(VAR_NAME:-/default/path) that will be dynamically resolved by CernVM-FS on access. Hardlinks are emulated by CernVM-FS. The hardlink count is stored in the lower 32bit of the hardlinks field, a hardlink group is stored in the higher 32 bit. If the hardlink group is greater than zero, all files with the same hardlink group will get the same inode issued by the CernVM-FS Fuse client. The emulated hardlinks work within the same directory, only. The cryptographic content hash refers to the zlib-compressed [Deutsch96] version of the file. Flags indicate the type of an directory entry (see table below).

Extended attributes are either NULL or stored as a BLOB of key-value pairs. It starts with 8 bytes for the data structure’s version (currently 1) followed by 8 bytes for the number of extended attributes. This is followed by the list of pairs, which start with two 8 byte values for the length of the key/value followed by the concatenated strings of the key and the value.

Flags	Meaning
1	Directory
2	Transition point to a nested catalog
33	Root directory of a nested catalog
4	Regular file
8	Symbolic link
68	Chunked file
132	External file (stored under path name)

As of bit 8, the flags the flags store the cryptographic content hash algorithm used to process the given file. Bit eleven is 1 if the file is stored uncompressed.

A file catalog contains a time to live (TTL), stored in seconds. The catalog TTL advises clients to check for a new version of the catalog, when expired. Checking for a new catalog version takes place with the first file system operation on a CernVM-FS volume after the TTL has expired. The default TTL is 4 minutes. If a new catalog is available, CernVM-FS delays the loading for the period of the CernVM-FS kernel cache life time (default: 1 minute). During this drain-out period, the kernel caching is turned off. The first file system operation on a CernVM-FS volume after that additional delay will apply a new file catalog and kernel caching is turned back on.

Content Hashes¶

CernVM-FS can use SHA-1 [Jones01], RIPEMD-160 [Dobbertin96] and SHAKE-128 [Bertoni09] as cryptographic hash function. The hash function can be changed on the Stratum 0 during the lifetime of repositories. On a change, new and updated files will use the new cryptographic hash while existing files remain unchanged. This is transparent to the clients since the hash function is stored in the flags field of file catalogs for each and every file. The default hash function is SHA-1. New software versions might introduce support for further cryptographic hash functions.

Nested Catalogs¶

In order to keep catalog sizes reasonable [1], repository subtrees may be cut and stored as separate nested catalogs. There is no limit on the level of nesting. A reasonable approach is to store separate software versions as separate nested catalogs. The figure below shows the simplified directory structure which we use for the ATLAS repository.

Directory structure useds for the ATLAS repository (simplified).

When a subtree is moved into a nested catalog, its entry directory serves as transition point for nested catalogs. This directory appears as empty directory in the parent catalog with flags set to 2. The same path appears as root-directory in the nested catalog with flags set to 33. Because the MD5 hash values refer to full absolute paths, nested catalogs store the root path prefix. This prefix is prepended transparently by CernVM-FS. The cryptographic hash of nested catalogs is stored in the parent catalog. Therefore, the root catalog fully defines an entire repository.

Loading of nested catalogs happens on demand by CernVM-FS on the first attempt to access of anything inside, a user won’t see the difference between a single large catalog and several nested catalogs. While this usually avoids unnecessary catalogs to be loaded, recursive operations like find can easily bypass this optimization.

Catalog Statistics¶

A CernVM-FS file catalog maintains several counters about its contents and the contents of all of its nested catalogs. The idea is that the catalogs know how many entries there are in their sub catalogs even without opening them. This way, one can immediately tell how many entries, for instance, the entire ATLAS repository has. Some of the numbers are shown using the number of inodes in statvfs. So df -i shows the overall number of entries in the repository and (as number of used inodes) the number of entries of currently loaded catalogs. Nested catalogs create an additional entry (the transition directory is stored in both the parent and the child catalog). File hardlinks are still individual entries (inodes) in the cvmfs catalogs. The following counters are maintained for both a catalog itself and for the subtree this catalog is root of:

Number of regular files
Number of symbolic links
Number of directories
Number of nested catalogs
Number of external files
Number of chunked files
Number of individual file chunks
Overall file content size
File content size stored in chunked files

Repository Manifest (.cvmfspublished)¶

Every CernVM-FS repository contains a repository manifest file that serves as entry point into the repository’s catalog structure. The repository manifest is the first file accessed by the CernVM-FS client at mount time and therefore must be accessible via HTTP on the repository root URL. It is always called .cvmfspublished and contains fundamental repository meta data like the root catalog’s cryptographic hash and the repository revision number as a key-value list.

Internal Manifest Structure¶

Below is an example of a typical manifest file. Each line starts with a capital letter specifying the meta data field, followed by the actual data string. The list of meta information is ended by a separator line (--) followed by signature information further described here.

C64551dccfbe0a48de7618dd7deb290200b474759
B1442336
Rd41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
D900
S42
Nexample.cern.ch
X731cca9476eb882f5a3f24aaa38001105a0e35eb
T1390301299
--
edde5308e502dd5e8fe405c56f5700f7477dc319
[...]

Please refer to table below for detailed information about each of the meta data fields.

Field	Meta Data Description
`C`	Cryptographic hash of the repository’s current root catalog
`B`	Size of the root file catalog in bytes
`A`	“yes” if the catalog should be fetched under its alternative name (outside servers /data directory)
`R`	MD5 hash of the repository’s root path (usually always `d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e`)
`B`	File size of the root catalog in bytes
`X`	Cryptographic hash of the signing certificate
`G`	“yes” if the repository is garbage-collectable
`H`	Cryptographic hash of the repository’s named tag history database
`T`	Unix timestamp of this particular revision
`D`	Time To Live (TTL) of the root catalog
`S`	Revision number of this published revision
`N`	The full name of the manifested repository
`M`	Cryptographic hash of the repository JSON metadata
`L`	currently unused (reserved for micro catalogs)

Repository Signature¶

In order to provide authoritative information about a repository publisher, the repository manifest is signed by an X.509 certificate together with its private key.

Signing a Repository¶

It is important to note that it is sufficient to sign just the manifest file itself to gain a secure chain of the whole repository. The manifest refers to the cryptographic content hash of the root catalog which in turn recursively references all sub-catalogs with their cryptographic content hashes. Each catalog lists its files along with their cryptographic content hashes. This concept is called a merkle tree and eventually provides a single hash that depends on the complete content of the repository.

The top level hash used for the repository signature can be found in the repository manifest right below the separator line (-- / see above). It is the cryptographic hash of the manifest’s meta data lines excluding the separator line. Following the top level hash is the actual signature produced by the X.509 certificate signing procedure in binary form.

Signature Validation¶

In order to validate repository manifest signatures, CernVM-FS uses a white-list of valid publisher certificates. The white-list contains the cryptographic fingerprints of known publisher certificates and a timestamp. A white-list is valid for 30 days. It is signed by a private RSA key, which we refer to as master key. The public RSA key that corresponds to the master key is distributed with the cvmfs-config-... RPMs as well as with every instance of CernVM.

As crypto engine, CernVM-FS uses libcrypto from the OpenSSL project.

Blacklisting¶

In addition to validating the white-list, CernVM-FS checks certificate fingerprints against the local black-list /etc/cvmfs/blacklist and the blacklist in an optional “Config Repository”. The blacklisted fingerprints have to be in the same format as the fingerprints on the white-list. The black-list has precedence over the white-list.

Blacklisted fingerprints prevent clients from loading future repository publications by a corresponding compromised repository key, but they do not prevent mounting a repository revision that had previously been mounted on a client, because the catalog for that revision is already in the cache. However, the same blacklist files also support another format that actively blocks revisions associated with a compromised repository key from being mounted and even forces them to be unmounted if they are mounted. The format for that is a less-than sign followed by the repository name followed by a blank and a repository revision number:

<repository.name NNN

This will prevent all revisions of a repository called repository.name less than the number NNN from being mounted or staying mounted. An effective protection against a compromised repository key will use both this format to prevent mounts and the fingerprint format to prevent accepting future untrustworthy publications signed by the compromised key.

Use of HTTP¶

The particular way of using the HTTP protocol has significant impact on the performance and usability of CernVM-FS. If possible, CernVM-FS tries to benefit from the HTTP/1.1 features keep-alive and cache-control. Internally, CernVM-FS uses the libcurl library.

The HTTP behaviour affects a system with cold caches only. As soon as all necessary files are cached, there is only network traffic when a catalog TTL expires. The CernVM-FS download manager runs as a separate thread that handles download requests asynchronously in parallel. Concurrent download requests for the same URL are collapsed into a single request.

DoS Protection¶

A subtle denial of service attack (DoS) can occur when CernVM-FS is successfully able to download a file but fails to store it in the local cache. This situation escalates into a DoS when the application using CernVM-FS remains in an endless loop and tries to open a file over and over again. Such a situation is prevented by CernVM-FS by re-trying with an exponential backoff. The backoff is triggered by consequtive filaures to cache a downloaded file within 10 seconds.

Keep-Alive¶

Although the HTTP protocol overhead is small in terms of data volume, in high latency networks we suffer from the bare number of requests: Each request-response cycle has a penalty of at least the network round trip time. Using plain HTTP/1.0, this results in at least $3\cdot\text{round trip time}$ additional running time per file download for TCP handshake, HTTP GET, and TCP connection finalisation. By including the Connection: Keep-Alive header into HTTP requests, we advise the HTTP server end to keep the underlying TCP connection opened. This way, overhead ideally drops to just round trip time for a single HTTP GET. The impact of the keep-alive feature is shown in here.

This feature, of course, somewhat sabotages a server-side load-balancing. However, exploiting the HTTP keep-alive feature does not affect scalability per se. The servers and proxies may safely close idle connections anytime, in particular if they run out of resources.

Cache Control¶

In a limited way, CernVM-FS advises intermediate web caches how to handle its requests. Therefor it uses the Pragma: no-cache and the Cache-Control: no-cache headers in certain cases. These cache control headers apply to both, forward proxies as well as reverse proxies. This is not a guarantee that intermediate proxies fetch a fresh original copy (though they should).

By including these headers, CernVM-FS tries to not fetch outdated cache copies. Only in case CernVM-FS downloads a corrupted file from a proxy server, it retries having the HTTP no-cache header set. This way, the corrupted file gets replaced in the proxy server by a fresh copy from the backend.

Identification Header¶

CernVM-FS sends a custom header (X-CVMFS2) to be identified by the web server. If you have set the CernVM GUID, this GUID is also transmitted.

Redirects¶

Normally, the Stratum-1 servers directly respond to HTTP requests so CernVM-FS has no need to support HTTP redirect response codes. However, there are some high-bandwidth applications where HTTP redirects are used to transfer requests to multiple data servers. To enable support for redirects in the CernVM-FS client, set CVMFS_FOLLOW_REDIRECTS=yes.

Name Resolving¶

Round-robin DNS entries for proxy servers are treated specially by CernVM-FS. Multiple IP addresses for the same proxy name are automatically transformed into multiple proxy servers within the same load-balance group. So the usual rules for load-balancing and fail-over apply to the different servers in a round-robin entry. CernVM-FS resolves all the proxy servers at once (and in parallel) at mount time. From that point on, proxy server names are resolved on demand, when a download takes place and the TTL of the active proxy expired. CernVM-FS resolves using /etc/host (resp. the file referenced in the HOST_ALIASES environment variable) or, if a host name is not resolvable locally, it uses the c-ares resolver. Proxy servers given in IP notation remain unchanged.

CernVM-FS uses the TTLs that come from DNS servers. However, there is a cutoff at 1 minute minimum TTL and 1 day maximum TTL. Locally resolved host names get a TTL of 1 minute. The host alias file is re-read with every attempt to resolve a name. Failed attempts to resolve a name remain cached for 1 minute, too. If a name has been successfully resolved previously, this result stays active until another successful attempt is done. If the DNS entries change for a host name, CernVM-FS adjust the corresponding load-balance group and picks a new server from the group at random.

The name resolving silently ignores errors in individual records. Only if no valid IP address is returned at all it counts as an error. IPv4 addresses have precedence if available. If the CVMFS_IPV4_ONLY environment variable is set,CernVM-FS does not try to resolve IPv6 records.

The timeout for name resolving is hard-coded to 2 attempts with a timeout of 3 seconds each. This is independent from the CVMFS_TIMEOUT and CVMFS_TIMEOUT(_DIRECT) settings. The effective timeout can be a bit longer than 6 seconds because of a backoff.

The name server used by CernVM-FS is looked up only once on start. If the name server changes during the life time of a CernVM-FS mount point, this change needs to be manually advertised to CernVM-FS using cvmfs_talk nameserver set.

Disk Cache¶

Each running CernVM-FS instance requires a local cache directory. Data are downloaded into a temporary files. Only at the very latest point they are renamed into their content-addressable names atomically by rename().

The hard disk cache is managed, CernVM-FS maintains cache size restrictions and replaces files according to the least recently used (LRU) strategy [Panagiotou06]. In order to keep track of files sizes and relative file access times, CernVM-FS sets up another SQLite database in the cache directory, the cache catalog. The cache catalog contains a single table; its structure is shown here:

Field	Type
Hash	String (hex notation)
Size	Integer
Access Sequence	Integer
Pinned	Integer
File type (chunk or file catalog)	Integer

CernVM-FS does not strictly enforce the cache limit. Instead CernVM-FS works with two customizable soft limits, the cache quota and the cache threshold. When exceeding the cache quota, files are deleted until the overall cache size is less than or equal to the cache threshold. The cache threshold is currently hard-wired to half of the cache quota. The cache quota is for data files as well as file catalogs. Currently loaded catalogs are pinned in the cache, they will not be deleted until unmount or until a new repository revision is applied. On unmount, pinned file catalogs are updated with the highest sequence number. As a pre-caution against a cache that is blocked by pinned catalogs, all catalogs except the root catalog are unpinned when the volume of pinned catalogs exceeds of the overall cache volume.

The cache catalog can be re-constructed from scratch on mount. Re-constructing the cache catalog is necessary when the managed cache is used for the first time and every time when “unmanaged” changes occurred to the cache directory, when CernVM-FS was terminated unexpectedly.

In case of an exclusive cache, the cache manager runs as a separate thread of the cvmfs2 process. This thread gets notified by the Fuse module whenever a file is opened or inserted. Notification is done through a pipe. The shared cache uses the very same code, except that the thread becomes a separate process (see Figure below). This cache manager process is not another binary but cvmfs2 forks to itself with special arguments, indicating that it is supposed to run as a cache manager. The cache manager does not need to be started as a service. The first CernVM-FS instance that uses a shared cache will automatically spawn the cache manager process. Subsequent CernVM-FS instances will connect to the pipe of this cache manager. Once the last CernVM-FS instance that uses the shared cache is unmounted, the communication pipe is left without any writers and the cache manager automatically quits.

The CernVM-FS cache supports two classes of files with respect to the cache replacement strategy: normal files and volatile files. The sequence numbers of volatile files have bit 63 set. Hence they are interpreted as negative numbers and have precedence over normal files when it comes to cache cleanup. On automatic rebuild the volatile property of entries in the cache database is lost.

NFS Maps¶

In normal mode, CernVM-FS issues inodes based on the row number of an entry in the file catalog. When exported via NFS, this scheme can result in inconsistencies because CernVM-FS does not control the cache lifetime of NFS clients. A once issued inode can be asked for anytime later by a client. To be able to reply to such client queries even after reloading catalogs or remounts of CernVM-FS, the CernVM-FS NFS maps implement a persistent store of the path names $\mapsto$ inode mappings. Storing them on hard disk allows for control of the CernVM-FS memory consumption (currently $\approx$ 45 MB extra) and ensures consistency between remounts of CernVM-FS. The performance penalty for doing so is small. CernVM-FS uses Google’s leveldb <https://github.com/google/leveldb>, a fast, local key value store. Reads and writes are only performed when meta-data are looked up in SQLite, in which case the SQLite query supposedly dominates the running time.

A drawback of the NFS maps is that there is no easy way to account for them by the cache quota. They sum up to some 150-200 Bytes per path name that has been accessed. A recursive find on /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch with 50 million entries, for instance, would add up 8GB in the cache directory. This is mitigated by the fact that the NFS mode will be only used on few servers that can be given large enough spare space on hard disk.

Loader¶

The CernVM-FS Fuse module comprises a minimal loader loader process (the cvmfs2 binary) and a shared library containing the actual Fuse module (libcvmfs_fuse.so). This structure makes it possible to reload CernVM-FS code and parameters without unmounting the file system. Loader and library don’t share any symbols except for two global structs cvmfs_exports and loader_exports used to call each others functions. The loader process opens the Fuse channel and implements stub Fuse callbacks that redirect all calls to the CernVM-FS shared library. Hotpatch is implemented as unloading and reloading of the shared library, while the loader temporarily queues all file system calls in-between. Among file system calls, the Fuse module has to keep very little state. The kernel caches are drained out before reloading. Open file handles are just file descriptors that are held open by the process. Open directory listings are stored in a Google dense_hash that is saved and restored.

File System Interface¶

CernVM-FS implements the following read-only file system call-backs.

mount¶

On mount, the file catalog has to be loaded. First, the file catalog manifest .cvmfspublished is loaded. The manifest is only accepted on successful validation of the signature. In order to validate the signature, the certificate and the white-list are downloaded in addition if not found in cache. If the download fails for whatever reason, CernVM-FS tries to load a local file catalog copy. As long as all requested files are in the disk cache as well, CernVM-FS continues to operate even without network access (offline mode). If there is no local copy of the manifest or the downloaded manifest and the cache copy differ, CernVM-FS downloads a fresh copy of the file catalog.

getattr and lookup¶

Requests for file attributes are entirely served from the mounted catalogs, there is no network traffic involved. This function is called as pre-requisite to other file system operations and therefore the most frequently called Fuse callback. In order to minimize relatively expensive SQLite queries, CernVM-FS uses a hash table to store negative and positive query results. The default size of for this memory cache is determined according to benchmarks with LHC experiment software.

Additionally, the callback takes care of the catalog TTL. If the TTL is expired, the catalog is re-mounted on the fly. Note that a re-mount might possibly break running programs. We rely on careful repository publishers that produce more or less immutable directory trees, new repository versions just add files.

If a directory with a nested catalog is accessed for the first time, the respective catalog is mounted in addition to the already mounted catalogs. Loading nested catalogs is transparent to the user.

readlink¶

A symbolic link is served from the file catalog. As a special extension, CernVM-FS detects environment variables in symlink strings written as $(VARIABLE) or $(VARIABLE:-/default/path). These variables are expanded by CernVM-FS dynamically on access (in the context of the cvmfs2 process). This way, a single symlink can point to different locations depending on the environment. This is helpful, for instance, to dynamically select software package versions residing in different directories.

readdir¶

A directory listing is served by a query on the file catalog. Although the “parent”-column is indexed (see Catalog table schema), this is a relatively slow function. We expect directory listing to happen rather seldom.

open / read¶

The open() call has to provide a file descriptor for a given path name. In CernVM-FS file requests are always served from the disk cache. The Fuse file handle is a file descriptor valid in the context of the CernVM-FS process. It points into the disk cache directory. Read requests are translated into the pread() system call.

getxattr¶

CernVM-FS uses extended attributes to display additional repository information. There are two supported attributes:

chunks: Number of chunks of a regular file.
compression: Compression algorithm, for regular files only. Either “zlib” or “none”.
expires: Shows the remaining life time of the mounted root file catalog in minutes.
external_file: Indicates if a regular file is an external file or not. Either 0 or 1.
external_host: Like host but for the host settings to fetch external files.
external_timeout: Like timeout but for the host settings to fetch external files.
fqrn: Shows the fully qualified repository name of the mounted repository.
hash: Shows the cryptographic hash of a regular file as listed in the file catalog.
host: Shows the currently active HTTP server.
host_list: Shows the ordered list of HTTP servers.
inode_max: Shows the highest possible inode with the current set of loaded catalogs.
lhash: Shows the cryptographic hash of a regular file as stored in the local cache, if available.
maxfd: Shows the maximum number of file descriptors available to file system clients.
ncleanup24: Shows the number of cache cleanups in the last 24 hours.
nclg: Shows the number of currently loaded nested catalogs.
ndiropen: Shows the overall number of opened directories.
ndownload: Shows the overall number of downloaded files since mounting.
nioerr: Shows the total number of I/O errors encoutered since mounting.
nopen: Shows the overall number of open() calls since mounting.
pid: Shows the process id of the CernVM-FS Fuse process.
proxy: Shows the currently active HTTP proxy.
pubkeys: The loaded public RSA keys used for repository whitelist verification.
rawlink: Shows unresolved variant symbolic links; only accessible as root.
revision: Shows the file catalog revision of the mounted root catalog, an auto-increment counter increased on every repository publish.
root_hash: Shows the cryptographic hash of the root file catalog.
rx: Shows the overall amount of downloaded kilobytes.
speed: Shows the average download speed.
tag: The configured repository tag.
timeout: Shows the timeout for proxied connections in seconds.
timeout_direct: Shows the timeout for direct connections in seconds.
uptime: Shows the time passed since mounting in minutes.
usedfd: Shows the number of file descriptors currently issued to file system clients.
version: Shows the version of the loaded CernVM-FS binary.

Extended attributes can be queried using the attr command. For instance, attr -g hash /cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/ChangeLog returns the cryptographic hash of the file at hand. The extended attributes are used by the cvmfs_config stat command in order to show a current overview of health and performance numbers.

Repository Publishing¶

Repositories are not immutable, every now and then they get updated. This might be installation of a new release or a patch for an existing release. But, of course, each time only a small portion of the repository is touched, say out of . In order not to re-process an entire repository on every update, we create a read-write file system interface to a CernVM-FS repository where all changes are written into a distinct scratch area.

Read-write Interface using a Union File System¶

Union file systems combine several directories into one virtual file system that provides the view of merging these directories. These underlying directories are often called branches. Branches are ordered; in the case of operations on paths that exist in multiple branches, the branch selection is well-defined. By stacking a read-write branch on top of a read-only branch, union file systems can provide the illusion of a read-write file system for a read-only file system. All changes are in fact written to the read-write branch.

Preserving POSIX semantics in union file systems is non-trivial; the first fully functional implementation has been presented by Wright et al. [Wright04]. By now, union file systems are well established for “Live CD” builders, which use a RAM disk overlay on top of the read- only system partition in order to provide the illusion of a fully read-writable system. CernVM-FS supports both aufs and OverlayFS union file systems.

Union file systems can be used to track changes on CernVM-FS repositories (Figure below). In this case, the read-only file system interface of CernVM-FS is used in conjunction with a writable scratch area for changes.

A union file system combines a CernVM-FS read-only mount point and a writable scratch area. It provides the illusion of a writable CernVM-FS mount point, tracking changes on the scratch area.

Based on the read-write interface to CernVM-FS, we create a feed-back loop that represents the addition of new software releases to a CernVM-FS repository. A repository in base revision $r$ is mounted in read-write mode on the publisher’s end. Changes are written to the scratch area and, once published, are re-mounted as repository revision $r+1$. In this way, CernVM-FS provides snapshots. In case of errors, one can safely resume from a previously committed revision.

Footnotes

[1]	As a rule of thumb, file catalogs up to (compressed) are reasonably small.

Large-Scale CVMFS¶

CVMFS primarily is developed for distributing large software stacks. However, by combining several extensions to the base software, one can use CVMFS to distribute large, non-public datasets. While there are several ways to deploy a the service, in this section we outline one potential path to achieve secure distribution of terabytes-to-petabytes of data.

To deploy large-scale CVMFS, a few design decisions are needed:

How is data distributed? For the majority of repositories, data is replicated from a repository server to an existing content distribution network tuned for the object size common to software repositories. The CDNs currently in use are tuned for working set size on the order of tens of gigabytes; they are not appropriately sized for terabytes of data. You will need to put together a mechanism for delivering data at the rates your clients will need.
- For example, ligo.osgstorage.org has about 20TB of data; each scientific workflow utilizes about 2TB of data and each running core averages 1Mbps of input data. So, to support the expected workflows at 10,000 running cores, several 10TB caches were deployed that could export a total of 40Gbps.
- The cms.osgstorage.org repository publishes 3PB of data. Each analysis will read around 20TB and several hundred analyses will run simultaneously. Given the large working set size, there is no caching layer and data is read directly from large repositories.
How is data published? By default, CVMFS publication will calculate checksums on its contents, compresses the data, and serves it from the Apache web server. Implicitly, this means all data must be _copied_ to and _stored_ on the repository host; at larger scales, this is prohibitively expensive. The cvmfs_swissknife graft tool provides a mechanism to publish files directly if the checksum is known ahead of time; see Grafting Files.
- For ligo.osgstorage.org, a cronjob copies all new data to the repository from a cache, creates the checksum file, and immediately deletes the downloaded file. Hence, the LIGO data is copied but not stored.
- The cms.osgstorage.org, a cronjob queries the underlying filesystem for the relevant checksum information and published the checksum. The data is neither copied nor stored on the repository
On publication, the files may be marked as non-compressed and externally stored. This allows the CVMFS client to be configured to be pointed at a non-CVMFS data (stored as the “logical name”, not the “content addressed” form). CVMFS clients can thus use existing data sources without change.
How is data secured? CVMFS was originally designed to distribute open-source software with strong data integrity guarantees. More recently, read-access authorization has been added to the software. An access control list is added to the repository (at creation time or publication time) and clients are configured to invoke a plugin for new process sessions. The plugin enforces the ACLs and forwards the user’s credential back to the CVMFS process. This allows the authorization to be enforced for worker node cache access and the CDN to enforce authorization on the CVMFS process for downloading new files to the cache.

The entire ACL is passed to the external plugin and not interpreted by CVMFS; the semantics are defined by the plugin. The existing plugin is based on GSI / X509 proxies and authorization can be added based on DN or VOMS FQANs.

In order to perform mounts, the root catalog must be accessible without authorization. However, the repository server (or CDN) can be configured to require authorization for the remaining data in the namespace.

Creating Large, Secure Repositories¶

For large-scale repositories, a few tweaks are useful at creation time. Here is the command used to create the cms.osgstorage.org:

cvmfs_server mkfs -V cms:/cms -X -Z none -o cmsuser cms.osgstorage.org

The -V cms:/cms option indicates that only clients with an X509 proxy with a VOMS extension from CMS are allowed to access the mounted proxy. If multiple VOMS extensions are needed, it’s easiest to add this at publication time.
-X indicates that, by default, files published to this repository are served at an “external URL”. The clients will attempt to access the file by name, not content hash, and look for the server as specified by the client’s setting of CVMFS_EXTERNAL_URL.
-Z none indicates that, by default, files published to this repository will not be marked as compressed.

By combining the -X and -Z options, files at an HTTP endpoint can be published in-place: no compression or copying into a different endpoint is necessary to publish.

Additional Information¶

Security Considerations¶

CernVM-FS provides end-to-end data integrity and authenticity using a signed Merkle Tree. CernVM-FS clients verify the signature and the content hashes of all downloaded data. Once a particular revision of a file system is stored in a client’s local cache, the client will not apply an older revision anymore.

The public key used to ultimately verify a repository’s signature needs to be distributed to clients through a channel different from CernVM-FS content distribution. In practice, these public keys are distributed as part of the source code or through cvmfs-config-... packages. One or multiple public keys can be configured for a repository (the fully qualified repository name), all repositories within a specific domain (like *.cern.ch) or all repositories (*). If multiple keys are configured, it is sufficient if any of them validates a signature.

Besides the client, data is also verified by the replication code (Stratum 1 or preloaded cache) and by the release manager machine in case the repository is stored in S3 and not on a local file system.

CernVM-FS does not provide data confidentiality out of the box. By default data is transferred through HTTP and thus only public data should be stored on CernVM-FS. However, CernVM-FS can be operated with HTTPS data transport. In combination with client-authentication using an authz helper (see Section Authorization Helpers), CernVM-FS can be configured for end-to-end data confidentiality.

Once downloaded and stored in a cache, the CernVM-FS client fully trusts the cache. Data in the cache can be checked for silent corruption but no integrity re-check takes place.

Signature Details¶

Creating and validating a repository signature is a two-step process. The repository manifest (the file .cvmfspublished) is signed by a private RSA key whose public part is stored in the form of an X.509 certificate in the repository. The fingerprint of all certificates that are allowed to sign a repository is stored on a repository whitelist (the file .cvmfswhitelist). The whitelist is signed with a different RSA key, the repository master key. Only the public part of this master key needs to be distributed to clients.

The X.509 certificate currently only serves as an envelope for the public part of a repository key. No further certificate validation takes place.

The repository manifest contains, among other information, the content hash of the root file catalog, the content hash of the signing certificate, the fully qualified repository name, and a timestamp. In order to sign the manifest, the content of the manifest is hashed and encrypted with a private repository key. The timestamp and repository name are used prevent replay attacks.

The whitelist contains the fully qualified repository name, a creation timestamp, an expiry timestamp, and the certificate fingerprints. Since the whitelist expires, it needs to be regularly resigned.

The private part of the repository key needs to be accessible on the release manager machine. The private part of the repository master key used to sign the whitelist can be maintained on a file on the release manager machine. We recommend, however, to use a smart card to store this private key. See section Master keys for more details.

Content Hashes¶

CernVM-FS supports multiple content hash algorithms: SHA-1 (default), RIPEMD-160, and SHAKE-128 with 160 output bits. The content hash algorithm can be changed with every repository publish operation. Files and file catalogs hashed with different content hash algorithms can co-exist. On changing the algorithm, new and changed files are hashed with the new algorithm, existing data remains unchanged. That allows seamless migration from one algorithm to another.

Local UNIX Permissions¶

Most parts of CernVM-FS do not require root privileges. On the server side, only creating and deleting a repository (or replica) requires root privileges. Repository transactions and snapshots can be performed with an unprivileged user account. In order to remount a new file system revision after publishing a transaction, the release manager machines uses a custom suid binary.

On client side, the CernVM-FS fuse module is normally started as root. It drops root privileges and changes the persona to the cvmfs user early in the file system initialization. The client RPM package installs SElinux rules for RHEL6 and RHEL7. The cache directory should be labeled as cvmfs_cache_t.

CernVM-FS Software Distribution¶

CernVM-FS software is distributed through HTTPS in packages. There are yum and apt repositories for Linux and pkg packages for OS X. Sofware is available from HTTPS servers. The Linux packages and repositories are signed with a GPG key.

CernVM-FS Parameters¶

Client parameters¶

Parameters recognized in configuration files under /etc/cvmfs:

Parameter	Meaning
CVMFS_ALIEN_CACHE	If set, use an alien cache at the given location
CVMFS_ALT_ROOT_PATH	If set to yes, use alternative root catalog path. Only required for fixed catalogs (tag / hash) under the alternative path.
CVMFS_AUTO_UPDATE	If set to no, disables the automatic update of file catalogs.
CVMFS_AUTHZ_HELPER	Full path to an authz helper, overwrites the helper hint in the catalog.
CVMFS_AUTHZ_SEARCH_PATH	Full path to the directory that contains the authz helpers.
CVMFS_BACKOFF_INIT	Seconds for the maximum initial backoff when retrying to download data.
CVMFS_BACKOFF_MAX	Maximum backoff in seconds when retrying to download data.
CVMFS_CACHE_BASE	Location (directory) of the CernVM-FS cache.
CVMFS_CHECK_PERMISSIONS	If set to no, disable checking of file ownership and permissions (open all files).
CVMFS_CLAIM_OWNERSHIP	If set to yes, allows CernVM-FS to claim ownership of files and directories.
CVMFS_DEBUGLOG	If set, run CernVM-FS in debug mode and write a verbose log the the specified file.
CVMFS_DEFAULT_DOMAIN	The default domain will be automatically appended to repository names when given without a domain.
CVMFS_DNS_RETRIES	Number of retries when resolving proxy names
CVMFS_DNS_TIMEOUT	Timeout in seconds when resolving proxy names
CVMFS_EXTERNAL_FALLBACK_PROXY	List of HTTP proxies similar to `CVMFS_EXTERNAL_HTTP_PROXY`. The fallback proxies are added to the end of the normal proxies, and disable DIRECT connections.
CVMFS_EXTERNAL_HTTP_PROXY	Chain of HTTP proxy groups to be used when CernVM-FS is accessing external data
CVMFS_EXTERNAL_TIMEOUT	Timeout in seconds for HTTP requests to an external-data server with a proxy server
CVMFS_EXTERNAL_TIMEOUT_DIRECT	Timeout in seconds for HTTP requests to an external-data server without a proxy server
CVMFS_EXTERNAL_URL	Semicolon-separated chain of webservers serving external data chunks.
CVMFS_FALLBACK_PROXY	List of HTTP proxies similar to `CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY`. The fallback proxies are added to the end of the normal proxies, and disable DIRECT connections.
CVMFS_FOLLOW_REDIRECTS	When set to yes, follow up to 4 HTTP redirects in requests.
CVMFS_HIDE_MAGIC_XATTRS	If set to yes the client will not expose CernVM-FS specific extended attributes
CVMFS_HOST_RESET_AFTER	See `CVMFS_PROXY_RESET_AFTER`.
CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY	Chain of HTTP proxy groups used by CernVM-FS. Necessary. Set to `DIRECT` if you don’t use proxies.
CVMFS_IGNORE_SIGNATURE	When set to yes, don’t verify CernVM-FS file catalog signatures.
CVMFS_INITIAL_GENERATION	Initial inode generation. Used for testing.
CVMFS_IPFAMILY_PREFER	Which IP protocol to prefer when connecting to proxies. Can be either 4 or 6.
CVMFS_KCACHE_TIMEOUT	Timeout for path names and file attributes in the kernel file system buffers.
CVMFS_KEYS_DIR	Directory containing *.pub files used as repository signing keys. If set, this parameter has precedence over `CVMFS_PUBLIC_KEY`.
CVMFS_LOW_SPEED_LIMIT	Minimum transfer rate a server or proxy must provide.
CVMFS_MAX_IPADDR_PER_PROXY	Limit the number of IP addresses a proxy names resolves into. From all registered addresses, up to the limit are randomly selected.
CVMFS_MAX_RETRIES	Maximum number of retries for a given proxy/host combination.
CVMFS_MAX_TTL	Maximum file catalog TTL in minutes. Can overwrite the TTL stored in the catalog.
CVMFS_MEMCACHE_SIZE	Size of the CernVM-FS meta-data memory cache in Megabyte.
CVMFS_MOUNT_RW	Mount CernVM-FS as a read/write file system. Write operations will fail but this option can workaround faulty `open()` flags.
CVMFS_NFILES	Maximum number of open file descriptors that can be used by the CernVM-FS process.
CVMFS_NFS_SOURCE	If set to yes, act as a source for the NFS daemon (NFS export).
CVMFS_NFS_SHARED	If set a path, used to store the NFS maps in an SQlite database, instead of the usual LevelDB storage in the cache directory.
CVMFS_PAC_URLS	Chain of URLs pointing to PAC files with HTTP proxy configuration information.
CVMFS_OOM_SCORE_ADJ	Set the Linux kernel’s out-of-memory killer priority for the CernVM-FS client [-1000 - 1000].
CVMFS_PROXY_RESET_AFTER	Delay in seconds after which CernVM-FS will retry the primary proxy group in case of a fail-over to another group.
CVMFS_PROXY_TEMPLATE	Overwrite the default proxy template in Geo-API calls. Only needed for debugging.
CVMFS_PUBLIC_KEY	Colon-separated list of repository signing keys.
CVMFS_QUOTA_LIMIT	Soft-limit of the cache in Megabyte.
CVMFS_RELOAD_SOCKETS	Directory of the sockets used by the CernVM-FS loader to trigger hotpatching/reloading.
CVMFS_REPOSITORIES	Comma-separated list of fully qualified repository names, used for default list by support tools such as cvmfs-talk.
CVMFS_REPOSITORY_DATE	A timestamp in ISO format (e.g. `2007-03-01T13:00:00Z`). Selects the repository state as of the given date.
CVMFS_REPOSITORY_TAG	Select a named repository snapshot that should be mounted instead of `trunk`.
CVMFS_CONFIG_REPO_REQUIRED	If set to yes, no repository can be mounted unless the config repository is available.
CVMFS_ROOT_HASH	Hash of the root file catalog, implies `CVMFS_AUTO_UPDATE=no`.
CVMFS_SEND_INFO_HEADER	If set to yes, include the cvmfs path of downloaded data in HTTP headers.
CVMFS_SERVER_CACHE_MODE	Enable special cache semantics for a client used as a release manager repository base line.
CVMFS_SERVER_URL	Semicolon-separated chain of Stratum~1 servers.
CVMFS_SHARED_CACHE	If set to no, makes a repository use an exclusive cache.
CVMFS_STRICT_MOUNT	If set to yes, mount only repositories that are listed in `CVMFS_REPOSITORIES`.
CVMFS_SYSLOG_FACILITY	If set to a number between 0 and 7, uses the corresponding LOCAL$n$ facility for syslog messages.
CVMFS_SYSLOG_LEVEL	If set to 1 or 2, sets the syslog level for CernVM-FS messages to LOG_DEBUG or LOG_INFO respectively.
CVMFS_SYSTEMD_NOKILL	If set to yes, modify the command line to `@vmfs2 ...` in order to act as a systemd lowlevel storage manager.
CVMFS_TIMEOUT	Timeout in seconds for HTTP requests with a proxy server.
CVMFS_TIMEOUT_DIRECT	Timeout in seconds for HTTP requests without a proxy server.
CVMFS_TRACEFILE	If set, enables the tracer and trace file system calls to the given file.
CVMFS_USE_GEOAPI	Request order of Stratum 1 servers and fallback proxies via Geo-API.
CVMFS_USER	Sets the `gid` and `uid` mount options. Don’t touch or overwrite.
CVMFS_USYSLOG	All messages that normally are logged to syslog are re-directed to the given file. This file can grow up to 500kB and there is one step of log rotation. Required for $mu$CernVM.
CVMFS_WORKSPACE	Set the local directory for storing special files (defaults to the cache directory).

Server parameters¶

Parameter	Meaning
CVMFS_AUFS_WARNING	Set to false to silence AUFS kernel deadlock warning.
CVMFS_AUTO_GC	Enables the automatic garbage collection on publish and snapshot
CVMFS_AUTO_GC_TIMESPAN	Date-threshold for automatic garbage collection (For example: 3 days ago, 1 week ago, …)
CVMFS_AUTO_REPAIR_MOUNTPOINT	Set to true to enable automatic recovery from bogus server mount states.
CVMFS_AUTO_TAG	Creates a generic revision tag for each published revision (if set to true).
CVMFS_AUTO_TAG_TIMESPAN	Date-threshold for automatic tags, after which auto tags get removed (For example: 4 days ago)
CVMFS_AUTOCATALOGS	Enable/disable automatic catalog management using autocatalogs.
CVMFS_AUTOCATALOGS_MAX_WEIGHT	Maximum number of entries in an autocatalog to be considered overflowed. Default value: 100000 (see also CVMFS_AUTOCATALOGS)
CVMFS_AUTOCATALOGS_MIN_WEIGHT	Minimum number of entries in an autocatalog to be considered underflowed. Default value: 1000 (see also CVMFS_AUTOCATALOGS)
CVMFS_AVG_CHUNK_SIZE	Desired Average size of a file chunk in bytes (see also CVMFS_USE_FILE_CHUNKING)
CVMFS_CATALOG_ALT_PATHS	Enable/disable generation of catalog bootstrapping shortcuts during publishing. (Useful when backend directory /data is not publicly accessible)
CVMFS_COMPRESSION_ALGORITHM	Compression algorithm to be used during publishing (currently either ‘default’ or ‘none’)
CVMFS_CREATOR_VERSION	The CernVM-FS version that was used to create this repository (do not change manually).
CVMFS_DONT_CHECK_OVERLAYFS_VERSION	Disable checking of OverlayFS version before usage. (see Requirements for a new Repository)
CVMFS_ENFORCE_LIMITS	Set to true to cause exceeding *LIMIT variables to be fatal to a publish instead of a warning
CVMFS_EXTERNAL_DATA	Set to true to mark repository to contain external data that is served from an external HTTP server
CVMFS_FILE_MBYTE_LIMIT	Maximum number of megabytes for a published file, default value: 1024 (see also CVMFS_ENFORCE_LIMITS)
CVMFS_FORCE_REMOUNT_WARNING	Enable/disable warning through `wall` and grace period before forcefully remounting a CernVM-FS repository on the release managere machine.
CVMFS_GARBAGE_COLLECTION	Enables repository garbage collection (Stratum~0 only \| if set to true)
CVMFS_GENERATE_LEGACY_BULK_CHUNKS	Set to false to disable generation of whole-file objects for large files. Requires clients >= 2.1.7.
CVMFS_GC_DELETION_LOG	Log file path to track all garbage collected objects during sweeping for bookkeeping or debugging
CVMFS_HASH_ALGORITHM	Define which secure hash algorithm should be used by CernVM-FS for CAS objects (supported are: sha1, rmd160 and shake128)
CVMFS_IGNORE_SPECIAL_FILES	Set to true to skip special files during publish without aborting.
CVMFS_IGNORE_XDIR_HARDLINKS	If set to true, do not abort the publish operation when cross-directory hardlinks are found. Instead automatically break the hardlinks across directories.
CVMFS_INCLUDE_XATTRS	Set to true to process extended attributes
CVMFS_MAX_CHUNK_SIZE	Maximal size of a file chunk in bytes (see also CVMFS_USE_FILE_CHUNKING)
CVMFS_MAXIMAL_CONCURRENT_WRITES	Maximal number of concurrently processed files during publishing.
CVMFS_MIN_CHUNK_SIZE	Minimal size of a file chunk in bytes (see also CVMFS_USE_FILE_CHUNKING)
CVMFS_NESTED_KCATALOG_LIMIT	Maximum thousands of files allowed in nested catalogs, default 500 (see also CVMFS_ROOT_KCATALOG_LIMIT and CVMFS_ENFORCE_LIMITS)
CVMFS_NUM_WORKERS	Maximal number of concurrently downloaded files during a Stratum1 pull operation (Stratum~1 only).
CVMFS_PUBLIC_KEY	Path to the public key file of the repository to be replicated. (Stratum 1 only).
CVMFS_REPLICA_ACTIVE	Stratum1-only: Set to no to skip this Stratum1 when executing `cvmfs_server snapshot -a`
CVMFS_REPOSITORY_NAME	The fully qualified name of the specific repository.
CVMFS_REPOSITORY_TYPE	Defines if the repository is a master copy (stratum0) or a replica (stratum1).
CVMFS_REPOSITORY_TTL	The frequency in seconds of client lookups for changes in the repository. Defaults to 4 minutes.
CVMFS_ROOT_KCATALOG_LIMIT	Maximum thousands of files allowed in root catalogs, default 200 (see also CVMFS_NESTED_KCATALOG_LIMIT and CVMFS_ENFORCE_LIMITS
CVMFS_SPOOL_DIR	Location of the upstream spooler scratch directories; the read-only CernVM-FS moint point and copy-on-write storage reside here.
CVMFS_STRATUM0	URL of the master copy (stratum0) of this specific repository.
CVMFS_STRATUM1	URL of the Stratum1 HTTP server for this specific repository.
CVMFS_UNION_DIR	Mount point of the union file system for copy-on-write semantics of CernVM-FS. Here, changes to the repository are performed (see CernVM-FS Repository Creation and Updating).
CVMFS_UNION_FS_TYPE	Defines the union file system to be used for the repository. (currently aufs and overlayfs are fully supported)
CVMFS_UPSTREAM_STORAGE	Upstream spooler description defining the basic upstream storage type and configuration.
CVMFS_USE_FILE_CHUNKING	Allows backend to split big files into small chunks (true \| false)
CVMFS_USER	The user name that owns and manipulates the files inside the repository.
CVMFS_VIRTUAL_DIR	Set to true to enable the hidden, virtual `.cvmfs/snapshots` directory containing entry points to all named tags.
CVMFS_VOMS_AUTHZ	Membership requirement (e.g. VOMS authentication) to be added into the file catalogs

Tiered Cache Parameters¶

The following parameters are used to configure a tiered cache manager instance.

Parameter	Meaning
CVMFS_CACHE_$name_UPPER	Name of the upper layer cache instance
CVMFS_CACHE_$name_LOWER	Name of the lower layer cache instance
CVMFS_CACHE_LOWER_READONLY	Set to true to avoid populating the lower layer

External Cache Plugin Parameters¶

The following parameters are used to configure an external cache plugin as a cache manager instance.

Parameter	Meaning
CVMFS_CACHE_$name_CMDLINE	If the client should start the plugin, the executable and command line parameters of the plugin, separated by comma.
CVMFS_CACHE_$name_LOCATOR	The address of the socket used for communication with the plugin.

In-memory Cache Plugin Parameters¶

The following parameters are interpreted from the configuration file provided to the in-memory cache plugin (see Section Example).

Parameter	Meaning
CVMFS_CACHE_PLUGIN_DEBUGLOG	If set, run CernVM-FS in debug mode and write a verbose log the the specified file.
CVMFS_CACHE_PLUGIN_LOCATOR	The address of the socket used for client communication
CVMFS_CACHE_PLUGIN_SIZE	The amount of RAM in megabyte used by the plugin for caching.

CernVM-FS Server Infrastructure¶

This section provides technical details on the CernVM-FS server setup including the infrastructure necessary for an individual repository. It is highly recommended to first consult “Notable CernVM-FS Server Locations and Files” for a more general overview of the involved directory structure.

Prerequisites¶

A CernVM-FS server installation depends on the following environment setup and tools to be in place:

Appropriate kernel version. You must have ONE of the following:
- kernel 4.2.x or later.
- RHEL7.3 kernel (for OverlayFS)
- Custom kernel compilation with aufs support the kernel (see Section Installing the AUFS-enabled Kernel on Scientific Linux 6)
Backend storage location available through HTTP
Backend storage accessible at /srv/cvmfs/... (unless stored on S3)
cvmfs and cvmfs-server packages installed

Local Backend Storage Infrastructure¶

CernVM-FS stores the entire repository content (file content and meta-data catalogs) into a content addressable storage (CAS). This storage can either be a file system at /srv/cvmfs or an S3 compatible object storage system (see “S3 Compatible Storage Systems” for details). In the former case the contents of /srv/cvmfs are as follows:

File Path	Description
`/srv/cvmfs`	Central repository storage location Can be mounted or symlinked to another location before creating the first repository.
`/srv/cvmfs/<fqrn>`	Storage location of a specific repository Can be symlinked to another location before creating the repository `<fqrn>`. This location needs to be both writable by the repository owner and accessible through an HTTP server.
`/srv/cvmfs/<fqrn>/.cvmfspublished`	Manifest file of the repository The manifest provides the entry point into the repository. It is the only file that needs to be signed by the repository’s private key.
`/srv/cvmfs/<fqrn>/.cvmfswhitelist`	List of trusted repository certificates Contains a list of certificate fingerprints that should be allowed to sign a repository manifest (see .cvmfspublished). The whitelist needs to be signed by a globally trusted private key.
`/srv/cvmfs/<fqrn>/data`	CAS location of the repository Data storage of the repository. Contains catalogs, files, file chunks, certificates and history databases in a content addressable file format. This directory and all its contents need to be writable by the repository owner.
`/srv/cvmfs/<fqrn>/data/00..ff`	Second CAS level directories Splits the flat CAS namespace into multiple directories. First two digits of the file content hash defines the directory the remainder is used as file name inside the corresponding directory.
`/srv/cvmfs/<fqrn>/data/txn`	CAS transaction directory Stores partial files during creation. Once writing has completed, the file is committed into the CAS using an atomic rename operation.

Server Spool Area of a Repository (Stratum0)¶

The spool area of a repository contains transaction infrastructure and scratch area of a Stratum0 or specifically a release manager machine installation. It is always located inside /var/spool/cvmfs with directories for individual repositories. Note that the data volume of the spool area can grow very large for massive repository updates since it contains the writable union file system branch and a CernVM-FS client cache directory.

File Path	Description
`/var/spool/cvmfs`	CernVM-FS server spool area Contains administrative and scratch space for CernVM-FS repositories. This directory should only contain directories corresponding to individual CernVM-FS repositories.
`/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>`	Individual repository spool area Contains the spool area of an individual repository and might temporarily contain large data volumes during massive repository updates. This location can be mounted or symlinked to other locations. Furthermore it must be writable by the repository owner.
`/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/cache`	CernVM-FS client cache directory Contains the cache of the CernVM-FS client mounting the r/o branch (i.e. `/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/rdonly`) of the union file system mount point located at `/cvmfs/<fqrn>`. The content of this directory is fully managed by the CernVM-FS client and hence must be configured as a CernVM-FS cache and writable for the repository owner.
`/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/rdonly`	CernVM-FS client mount point Serves as the mount point of the CernVM-FS client exposing the latest published state of the CernVM-FS repository. It needs to be owned by the repository owner and should be empty if CernVM-FS is not mounted to it.
`/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/scratch`	Writable union file system scratch area All file system changes applied to `/cvmfs/<fqrn>` during a transaction will be stored in this directory. Hence, it potentially needs to accommodate a large data volume during massive repository updates. Furthermore it needs to be writable by the repository owner.
`/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/tmp`	Temporary scratch location Some CernVM-FS server operations like publishing store temporary data files here, hence it needs to be writable by the repository owner. If the repository is idle this directory should be empty.
`/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/client.config`	CernVM-FS client configuration This contains client configuration variables for the CernVM-FS client mounted to `/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/rdonly`. Most notibly it needs to contain `CVMFS_ROOT_HASH` configured to the latest revision published in the corresponding repository. This file needs to be writable by the repository owner.

Repository Configuration Directory¶

The authoritative configuration of a CernVM-FS repository is located in /etc/cvmfs/repositories.d and should only be writable by the administrator. Furthermore the repository’s keychain is located in /etc/cvmfs/keys and follows the naming convention <fqrn>.crt for the certificate, <fqrn>.key for the repository’s private key and <fqrn>.pub for the public key. All of those files can be symlinked somewhere else if necessary.

File Path	Description
`/etc/cvmfs/repositories.d`	CernVM-FS server config directory This contains the configuration directories for individual CernVM-FS repositories. Note that this path is shortened using `/.../repos.d/` in the rest of this table.
`/.../repos.d/<fqrn>`	Config directory for specific repo This contains the configuration files for one specific CernVM-FS repository server.
`/.../repos.d/<fqrn>/server.conf`	Server configuration file Authoriative configuration file for the CernVM-FS server tools. This file should only contain valid server configuration variables as it controls the behaviour of the CernVM-FS server operations like publishing, pulling and so forth.
`/.../repos.d/<fqrn>/client.conf`	Client configuration file Authoriative configuration file for the CernVM-FS client used to mount the latest revision of a Stratum 0 release manager machine. This file should only contain valid client configuration variables. This file must not exist for Stratum 1 repositories.
`/.../repos.d/<fqrn>/replica.conf`	Replication configuration file Contains configuration variables for Stratum 1 specific repositories. This file must not exist for Stratum 0 repositories.

Environment Setup¶

Apart from file and directory locations a CernVM-FS server installation depends on a few environment configurations. Most notably the possibility to access the backend storage through HTTP and to allow for mounting of both the CernVM-FS client at /var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/rdonly and a union file system on /cvmfs/<fqrn>.

Granting HTTP access can happen in various ways and depends on the chosen backend storage type. For an S3 hosted backend storage, the CernVM-FS client can usually be directly pointed to the S3 bucket used for storage (see “S3 Compatible Storage Systems” for details). In case of a local file system backend any web server can be used for this purpose. By default CernVM-FS assumes Apache and uses that automatically.

Internally the CernVM-FS server uses a SUID binary (i.e. cvmfs_suid_helper) to manipulate its mount points. This is necessary since transactional CernVM-FS commands must be accessible to the repository owner that is usually different from root. Both the mount directives for /var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/rdonly and /cvmfs/<fqrn> must be placed into /etc/fstab for this reason. By default CernVM-FS uses the following entries for these mount points:

cvmfs2#<fqrn> /var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/rdonly fuse \
allow_other,config=/etc/cvmfs/repositories.d/<fqrn>/client.conf: \
/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/client.local,cvmfs_suid 0 0

aufs_<fqrn> /cvmfs/<fqrn> aufs br=/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/scratch=rw: \
/var/spool/cvmfs/<fqrn>/rdonly=rr,udba=none,ro 0 0

Available Packages¶

The CernVM-FS software is available in form of several packages:

cvmfs-release: Adds the CernVM-FS yum/apt repository.
cvmfs-config-default: Contains a configuration and public keys suitable for nodes in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. Provides access to repositories in the cern.ch, egi.eu, and opensciencegrid.org domains.
cvmfs-config-none: Empty package to satisfy the cvmfs-config requirement of the cvmfs package without actually installing any configuration.
cvmfs: Contains the Fuse module and additional client tools. It has dependencies to at least one of the cvmfs-config-$\cdots$ packages.
cvmfs-devel: Contains the libcvmfs.a static library and the libcvmfs.h header file for use of CernVM-FS with Parrot [Thain05] as well as the libcvmfs_cache.a static library and libcvmfs_cache.h header in order to develop cache plugins.
cvmfs-auto-setup: Only available through yum. This is a wrapper for cvmfs_config setup. This is supposed to provide automatic configuration for the ATLAS Tier3s. Depends on cvmfs.
cvmfs-server: Contains the CernVM-FS server tool kit for maintaining Stratum 0 and Stratum 1 servers.
kernel-…-.aufs21: Scientific Linux 6 kernel with aufs. Required for SL6 based Stratum 0 servers.
cvmfs-unittests: Contains the cvmfs_unittests binary. Only required for testing.

References¶

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Guerrero, D. 1999. Caching the web, part 2. Linux Journal. 58 (Feburary 1999).

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Panagiotou, K. and Souza, A. 2006. On adequate performance measures for paging. Annual ACM Symposium on Theory Of Computing. 38, (2006), 487-496.

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Schubert, M. et al. 2008. Nagios 3 enterprise network monitoring. Syngress.

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Shepler, S. et al. 2003. Network File System (NFS) version 4 Protocol. Technical Report #3530. Internet Engineering Task Force.

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Contact and Authors¶

Visit our website on cernvm.cern.ch.

Authors of this documentation:

Jakob Blomer

Predrag Buncic

Dave Dykstra

René Meusel

José Molina Colmenero

Radu Popescu

Welcome to CernVM-FS’s documentation!¶

What is CernVM-FS?¶

Contents¶

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.4.4¶

Bug Fixes and Improvements¶

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.4.3¶

Bug Fixes and Improvements¶

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.4.2¶

Bug Fixes and Improvements¶

Manual Migration from 2.4.1 Stratum 1 Web Servers¶

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.4.1¶

Cache Plugins¶

Tiered Cache¶

Instant Access to Named Snapshots¶

Branching¶

Snapshot Diffs¶

Faster Propagation of Repository Updates¶

Yubikey Support¶

New apt Repositories¶

Bug Fixes¶

Other Improvements¶

Manual Migration from 2.3.5 Release Manager Machines and Stratum 0/1 Web Servers¶

Overview¶

Getting Started¶

Getting the Software¶

Installation¶

Linux¶

Mac OS X¶

Usage¶

Debugging Hints¶

Client Configuration¶

Structure of /etc/cvmfs¶

The “Config Repository”¶

Mounting¶

Private Mount Points¶

Docker Containers¶

Volume Driver¶

Bind mount from the host¶

Mount inside a container¶

Parrot Connector to CernVM-FS¶

Network Settings¶

IP Protocol Version¶

Stratum 1 List¶

Proxy Lists¶

Automatic Proxy Configuration¶

Fallback Proxy List¶

Ordering of Servers according to Geographic Proximity¶

Timeouts¶

Cache Settings¶

Alien Cache¶

Advanced Cache Configuration¶

Tiered Cache¶

External Cache Plugin¶

Example¶

NFS Server Mode¶

Tuning¶

Shared NFS Maps (HA-NFS)¶

Example¶

Hotpatching and Reloading¶

Auxiliary Tools¶

cvmfs_fsck¶

cvmfs_config¶

cvmfs_talk¶

Other¶

Debug Logs¶

Setting up a Local Squid Proxy¶

CernVM-FS on Supercomputers¶

Parrot-Mounted CernVM-FS in lieu of Fuse Module¶

Preloading the CernVM-FS Cache¶

Access from the Nodes¶

Compiling cvmfs_preload from Sources¶

Loopback File Systems for Nodes’ Caches¶

Tiered Cache and Cache Plugins¶

Creating a Repository (Stratum 0)¶

CernVM-FS Server Quick-Start Guide¶

System Requirements¶

Installation¶

Content Publishing¶

Backup Policy¶

Installing the AUFS-enabled Kernel on Scientific Linux 6¶

Compiling `cvmfs_preload` from Sources¶

Managing Nested Catalogs with `.cvmfsdirtab`¶