Administration
Grid Service Deployment Checklist
Check that the Service Metadata is Complete and Accurate
Service metadata contains information about your grid service. It contains information like, where the grid service is hosted; the point of contact etc. caGrid Portal uses this service metadata to display information about your grid service. If any of this data is missing, the grid service will not be displayed accurately on portal.
Provide Hosting Center Information and Ensure that the Address is Accurate
This includes a complete and accurate address of the hosting center. For the hosting center, please enter the full name of the comprehensive cancer center as well as the medical school or associated university. For the short name, use a meaningful short name like FCCC for Fox Chase Cancer Center. For the address, ensure that a complete address is entered for your node (including zip code). Without this information the grid node will not appear on the portal map.
Provide Point of Contact
Point of contact is the center administrator (or technical lead) who will maintain the grid service and will be contacted in case there are issues with the grid service. Please ensure that you provide a valid contact with an accurate email address and phone number
Please go to the following link for instructions on entering service metadata: CaGrid:FAQ#My_service_is_in_the_Portal.2C_but_is_not_on_the_map
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Check that the Grid Service is Advertising Correctly
 | NOTE: Steps in this section require you to download globus which can be obtained from here caGrid Globus 4.0.3. If you already have globus installed via your installation then you don't need to re-download it. Once you have downloaded Globus and unzipped the file, you will need to set the environment variable GLOBUS_LOCATION to point to the directory where globus was unzipped. Eg. GLOBUS_LOCATION=C:\ws-core-enum-4.0.3. Please check the following: |
Service Can Access the Index Service
To broadcast service information, the Service sends a registration request to the caGrid's Index Service. This is an HTTP Request. Please make sure that the machine hosting the service has access to the internet and is able to reach the caGrid Index Service. You can test this by bringing up browser on the machine hosting the grid service and pointing it to the following URL: http://cagrid-index.nci.nih.gov:8080/wsrf/services/DefaultIndexService.You should see a "Hi there, this is an Axis Service" message
Service Can Broadcast its Metadata
If the service was successfully deployed, the service should be able to broadcast its metadata information. You can test this by following the instructions in the link below:
Troubleshoot Index Service Registration#Make sure the service's metadata is accessible
Service is Broadcasting Correct Host Name
When the service is hosted behind a firewall or is in the DMZ and has a locally assigned IP address. The IP may not be accessible from outside the firewall. The DNS name or IP address of the local machine (hosting the service) should be accessible from outside the firewall. Please follow the instructions in the link below:
Troubleshoot Index Service Registration#Make sure your container is publishing the right host name
Grid Service is Successfully Registered on Index Service
After following the steps above, the grid service should register successfully on the Index Service. You can verify this by taking an extract of the index service data and finding your grid service in the text file, you can search using the URL or hosting center information. Please follow the instructions available at: Troubleshoot Index Service Registration#Dump the contents of the Index Service
You will need to route the output of the command into a text file, you can search the index file to verify that your service was registered. Eg. $GLOBUS_LOCATION/bin/wsrf-query -a -z none -s http://cagrid-index.nci.nih.gov:8080/wsrf/services/DefaultIndexService / > /tmp/indexDump.txt
All the instructions can be found at: Troubleshoot Index Service Registration
Check that the Machine Clock is Synchronized with the Index Service
The registration request of your service is time bound; it has a "begin by" and "end by" time association. If the system time on the host on which the service is running is not synchronized, your service will appear INACTIVE on the portal. NOTE: The initial registration after boot-up may cause the service to appear ACTIVE momentarily. However the service will go inactive after some time. caGrid synchronizes all its servers with a standard time service like NIST. We recommend that you run some time service and ensure that your machine clock is in synchronized.
Check that the Service was Successfully Deployed
Test by Going to the Machine where the Service was Installed and Access the Service from the Browser
After successfully installing the service and starting the grid service, you can check if the service is running by starting a browser on the local machine. You can use the following URL to verify that the service is functional.
http(s)://localhost:<port>/wsrf/services/caGrid/<servicename>
You should see a "Hi there, this is an Axis Service" message
Running Any Test Client Provided
If there is a test client packaged with the service. You can run the test client by providing the appropriate URL. Note: If you are running the client on the same machine, you should use localhost.
Check that the Service is Accessible Outside the Firewall
Check that the Grid Service Ports are Open
You need to make sure that the service port(s) are open and an externally available IP or DNS entry is mapped to the machine hosting the grid service. You can verify this by querying the service from outside the firewall (or center's network).
Check that there is no IP Filtering or Other Restrictions on the Port
As Grid users may access the service from any machine, you cannot enforce IP filtering or restrictions on DNS entry/ port for accessing your Grid Service. The service should be accessible to all users and all IP's.
Removing Your Old Service from the Portal
Many a times during the initial phase of deployments services are registered with their IP address. However later on when these services are re-registered with externally available DNS entries, we have a duplicate in Portal. This is because Portal caches your service registrations for a finite period before they are flushed out of the system. So in this case you have two registrations in the Portal one was for your IP based registration (which is old and your service is no longer broadcasting on it) and the new DNS entry based registration. As a result of which you see two entries for your service one INACTIVE (the old IP based) and one ACTIVE (the new DNS entry based).
In such scenarios you need to ensure that the old registration entry is removed from the portal. You should contact the NCICB Application Support using the contact information at the following URL http://ncicb.nci.nih.gov/support, and request them to ban the service. You would need to provide your old IP based service URL which is inactive (make sure you don't provide the new DNS entry based URL else your active service will be banned). A service which is placed in the banned state is invisible in the portal. This way you would only see the active service on the portal.