Hub/Switch Installation Guide

Chapter 1 HPSS Basics

HPSS Installation Guide September 2002 33

Release 4.5, Revision 2

whereby a user's access permissions to an HPSS bitﬁle are speciﬁed by the HPSS bitﬁle

authorization agent, the Name Server. These permissions are processed by the bitﬁle data

authorization enforcementagent, theBitﬁleServer. Theintegrityoftheaccesspermissions

is certiﬁed by the inclusion of a checksum that is encrypted using the security context key

shared between the HPSS Name Server and Bitﬁle Server.

• Logging. A logging infrastructure component in HPSS provides an audit trail of server

events. Logged data includes alarms, events, requests, security audit records, status

records, and trace information. Servers send log messages to a Log Client (a server

executingoneach hardware platformcontainingservers thatuselogging). TheLog Client,

which may keep a temporary local copy of logged information, communicates log

messages to a central Log Daemon, which in turn maintains a central log. Depending on

the type of log message, the Log Daemon may send the message to the SSM for display

purposes. When the central HPSS log ﬁlls, messages are sent to a secondary log ﬁle. A

conﬁguration option allows the ﬁlled log to be automatically archived to HPSS. A delog

function is provided to extract and format log records. Delog options support ﬁltering by

time interval, record type, server, and user.

• Accounting. The primary purpose of the HPSS accounting system is to provide the means

to collectinformation on usage in order to allow a particularsite to charge itsusers for the

use of HPSS resources.

For everyaccount index, the storage usageinformation is written out toan ASCII text ﬁle.

It istheresponsibility of the individual sitetosortandusethis informationfor subsequent

billing based on site-speciﬁc charging policies. For more information on the HPSS

accounting policy, refer to Section 1.3.7.

1.3.5 HPSS User Interfaces

AsindicatedinFigure1-3,HPSSprovidestheuserwithanumberoftransferinterfacesasdiscussed

below.

• File Transfer Protocol (FTP). HPSS provides an industry-standard FTP user interface.

Because standard FTP is a serialinterface, data sentto a user is received serially. This does

not meanthatthedatawithin HPSSis notstored and retrievedin parallel;it simply means

that the FTP Daemon within HPSS must consolidate its internal parallel transfers into a

serialdatatransfer totheuser. HPSSFTPperformance inmanycaseswill belimitednot by

the speed of a single storage device, as in most other storage systems, but by the speed of

the data path between the HPSS FTP Daemon and the user’s FTP client.

• NetworkFileSystem(NFS).TheNFSserverinterfaceforHPSSprovidestransparentaccess

toHPSSnamespaceobjects andbitﬁledataforclient systemsthroughtheNFSservice.The

NFSimplementationconsists ofanNFSDaemonandaMountDaemonthatprovideaccess

toHPSS,plusserversupportfunctionsthatarenotaccessibletoNFSclients.TheHPSSNFS

servicewillworkwithany industry-standardNFSclientthatsupportseither (orboth)NFS

V2 and V3 protocols.

• Parallel FTP (PFTP). The PFTP supports standard FTP commands plus extensions and is

built to optimize performance for storing and retrieving ﬁles from HPSS by allowing data

to betransferred in parallel across the networkmedia. The parallel client interfaceshave a

syntax similar to FTP but with some extensions to allow the user to transfer data to and

from HPSS across parallel communication interfaces established between the FTP client