IPv6 and XrootD 4

Xrootd version 4 has recently been released. As QMUL is involved in IPv6 testing, and as this new release now supports IPv6, I thought I ought to test it.  So,  what does this involve?

1. Set up a dual stack virtual machine - our deployment system now makes this relatively easy. 
2. Install xrootd. QMUL is a StoRM/Lustre site, and has an existing xrootd server that is part of Atlas's  FAX (Federated ATLAS storage systems using XRootD), so it's just a matter of configuring a new machine to export our posix storage in much the same way.  In fact, I've done it slightly differently as I'm also testing ARGUS authentication, but that's something for another blog post. 
3. Test it - the difficult bit...

I decided to test it using CERN's dual stack lxplus machine: lxplus-ipv6.cern.ch.

First, I tested that I'd got FAX set up correctly:

setupATLAS
localSetupFAX
voms-proxy-init --voms atlas
testFAX

All 3 tests were successful, so I've got FAX working, next configure it to use my test machine:

export STORAGEPREFIX=root://xrootd02.esc.qmul.ac.uk:1094/
testFAX

Which also gave 3 successful tests out of 3. Finally, to prove that downloading files works, and that it isn't just redirection that works, I tested a file that should only be at QMUL:

xrdcp -d 1 root://xrootd02.esc.qmul.ac.uk:1094//atlas/rucio/user/ivukotic:user.ivukotic.xrootd.uki-lt2-qmul-1M -> /dev/null 

All of these reported that they were successful. Were they using IPv6 though? Well looking at Xrootd's logs, it certainly thinks so - at least for some connections, though some still seem to be using IPv4:

140723 16:03:47 18291 XrootdXeq: cwalker.19073:26@lxplus0063.cern.ch pub IPv6 login as atlas027
140723 16:04:01 18271 XrootdXeq: cwalker.20147:27@lxplus0063.cern.ch pub IPv4 login as atlas027
140723 16:04:29 23892 XrootdXeq: cwalker.20189:26@lxplus0063.cern.ch pub IPv6 login as atlas027

Progress!!!