Download Oscar 6.0.1

The folks at the Open Cluster Group have released the latest version 6.0.1 of their collection of best practices for creating a Linux cluster. Open Source Cluster Application Resources, better known as Oscar, supports various Linux distributions such as Debian 4, Ubuntu 8, Fedora Core 9, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and CentOS 5. For more information, please refer to this page. The developers have accompanied the release of Oscar 6.0.1 with the following list of changes:

Version 6.0.1:

• Add RPMs for OSCAR core on Fedora Core 9 (both i386 and x86_64).
• Update the RPM list for rhel-5-x86_64 and compatible distributions.
• Merge oscar-base.spec.in and oscar.spec.in.
• Clean up the Makefile portion related to the generation of RPMs for oscar-base.
• Clean up the spec file for oscar base.
• Update ODA to 1.3.5.
• Update PackMan to 3.1.5.
• Update Yume to 2.8.4.
• Update Selector to 1.0.2.
• During bootstrapping, a log file is now created (/var/log/oscar/bootstrap.log).
• Include two new options to the oscar-config script: debug and verbose.
• During bootstrapping, we install only one core OPKG at a time, to be able to really get details on errors.
• Fix a bug when generating the DHCPD configuration file on Debian.
• New abstraction for the management of system services.
• Include capabilities for file management: download and type detection.
• [Ticket #506] Include a “virtual” OSCAR RPM that allows the installation of all dependencies needed for the OSCAR bootstrap.
• [Ticket #503] Configurator is now a separate component with its own SVN tree, ie, Configurator is now a prereq.
• [Ticket #507] With prereqs on RPM based system the dumb mode tries to use yum is a package is not locally available.
• [Torque OPKG] Update the list of prereqs for the creation of the binary packages (build.cfg).
• Improve unit tests.
• [Ticket #463] Finish to remove all binary packages from the source tree, oscar-packager provides the needed abstractions for the creation of binary packages.
• Prereqs on RPM systems in dumb mode now try to use yum if a package is not locally available.
• Include the patch from Felipe Zipitria: avoid warnings on some configuration when using OSCAR::ConfigFile.
• Improve the perldoc documentation of different OSCAR Perl modules.
• [Ticket #502] Binary packages for oscar-base do not over-write the /etc/oscar/oscar.conf file anymore.

Version 6.0:

This version provides the latest modifications which will ease future developments. On the roadmap, we already plan to include many project on which students worked during the summer 2008, including a benchmarking framework, a monitoring framework, and mechanisms to deal with specific NFS configuration. This version will also be a good base for bug fixes.

Remember that this version does not provide yet all the capabilities OSCAR were used to provide. For this version, we focused on the implementation of a stable OSCAR core and cleaning up; which should allow us to move forward. More capabilities will be included in future OSCAR-6.x releases.

Right now, OSCAR-6.x supports only RHEL/CentOS 5 for both x86 and x86_64 in a production environment. The support of Debian systems is still experimental since we found a critical bug in opkgc (which should be fixed shortly).

OSCAR-6.0 is available through our YUM/APT on-line repositories. For more details about how to use those repositories, please refer to The next version of OSCAR-6.x will be available via the same repositories, providing an easy way to update OSCAR.

• Full support of on-line repositories.
• Implementation of a new bootstrapping mechanism via oscar-config.
• Installation using normal system paths.
• Continue the modularization effort (almost all core components are now in separate packages).
• Improve error handling.