[gram-user] questions about GRAM audit

[Martin Feller]

Tom Scavo wrote:
> As you may know, TeraGrid resource providers have begun to deploy a
> Science Gateways Capability Kit on top of their CTSS4 middleware
> stack.  This Capability Kit is based on GT 4.0.8 plus custom GRAM JARs
> plus GridShib for GT v0.6.2 plus GridShib SAML Tools v0.5.3.  As it
> turns out, the linchpin that ties this all together is GRAM audit.
> 
> Early feedback from deployers is beginning to suggest that we don't
> have enough documentation to support GRAM audit in production.  I
> suppose we'll have to do something about that (although I don't yet
> know who "we" are in this context :)  In the meantime, I have some
> comments/questions that maybe you can help me with.
> 
> 1. We've already encountered problems with naming in our
> documentation, which we've taken steps to remedy.  I dare say we
> inherited this problem from you ;-) since the Globus GRAM audit docs
> also have naming problems.  The GRAM audit database goes by a couple
> of different names, for instance.

Should be auditDatabase, i fixed it in the docs.

> 
> 2. Why is there a section re GT 4.0.9 in the GRAM audit docs?  A
> couple of people have asked about that.

A snapshot of GRAM4 from the 4.0 branch that includes the latest auditing
improvements was given to TeraGrid.  So TG basically has the version of
GRAM4 that will eventually go out in GT 4.0.9. Creating the doc assuming
that GT 4.0.9 will eventually go out seemed to make most sense.

> 
> 3. What are the recommended versions of MySQL and PostgreSQL in a
> production environment?  Does it matter which database version we use
> for GRAM audit?
> 

The gram4 audit given to TG was tested with MySQL version 5.0.51a and
PostgreSQL version 8.3.3. We know those versions worked for us, but
in general I never experienced problems with other MySQL and PostgreSQL
with audit logging.


> 4. Related to the previous question, what are the recommended JDBC
> drivers for MySQL and PostgreSQL?  There's an old version of a
> PostgreSQL JDBC driver in Globus CVS (should we use this?), but
> there's no MySQL driver that I can find.
> 

If you use PostgreSQL 8.x, I'd try to get a newer JDBC driver as
recommended on http://jdbc.postgresql.org/download.html and would rather
not take the old pg73jdbc2.jar we ship in GT. I'm not entirely sure if
taking the old driver will result in errors.

I think I once saw a problem where a MySQL driver didn't really fit to
the MySQL database version, which resulted in cryptic error messages.
I think I'd recomment MySQL v5.x with the recommended driver from
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/5.1.html.
But i personally also never had problems with MySQL v4.x

-Martin

> Thanks in advance for your advice,
> 
> Tom Scavo
> NCSA