I - Preinstallation steps

From now on this guide assumes that you're using a real tape library. However, you can give MHVTL a try to test with a virtual tape library instead.

Before installing CTA, make sure you have the following packages, which will be useful for tape management later on (See: Know your tape library with mtx and mt)

• mt-st: magnetic tape drive control tool

• mtx: SCSI media changer device control tool

• lsscsi: list SCSI devices

Other packages you need in order to start the preinstallation steps are:

• yum-utils

• yum-plugin-priorities

• yum-plugin-versionlock

First we are going to add the cta-public repository to /etc/yum.repos.ddirectory.

# CTA-4
[cta-public]
name=CERN Tape Archive
baseurl=https://cta-public-repo.web.cern.ch/cta-4/el-7/cta
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
exclude=yum-conf*
metadata_expire=43200
skip_if_unavailable=1
keepcache = 0

# CTA-5
[cta-public]
name=CERN Tape Archive
baseurl=https://cta-public-repo.web.cern.ch/cta-5/el-7/cta
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
exclude=yum-conf*
metadata_expire=43200
skip_if_unavailable=1
keepcache = 0

You'll notice that you can choose between CTA-4 or CTA-5. For CTA the versioning convention is to have the major version match the XRootD version it is compiled against. For more information about versioning, see CTA Version Numbering (EOSCTA Docs).

Once you have decided which version you are going to use and you've set the proper repository, let's install the first package, which is cta-release.

yum install cta-release

The cta-release rpm allows us to create an appropiate versionlock file specifying the correct version of all CTA packages and dependencies in order to not mess up with the installation. Note that if you don't specify the version, yum will try to install the latest version found on the repo. Once installed, check that the following repositories have been added to /etc/yum.repos.d:

• cta-ceph.repo

• cta-eos-citrine.repo

• cta-eos-citrine-depend.repo

• cta-eos-diopside.repo

• cta-eos-diopside-depend.repo

• cta-eos-quarkdb.repo

• cta-oracle-instant-client.repo

Let's create our versionlock.list. This is a text file that specifies the exact version of packages and its dependencies. These will match the cta-release version. Create the versionlock.list with the following command:

cta-versionlock apply
Adding CTA packages and dependencies to versionlock.list
==> adding: 95/95

We can check the versionlock.list either directly looking at the file (at /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/versionlock.list) or with the following comand:

cta-versionlock check

Yum versionlock status for CTA packages and dependencies
==> ok: 95/95

If you already had an older versionlock.list and some versions are wrong, you can always overwrite them with:

cta-versionlock forceupdate
Adding and updating CTA packages and dependencies in versionlock.list
==> updating: 0/95 Nothing to do

This way you cannot mess up with packages versioning when installing.

You've finished the preinstallation steps. Jump to II - Installation guide to continue!