Maintenance and upgrading

1. Commercial support
2. Maintaining Arvados
   1. Modification of the config.yml file
   2. Distributing the configuration file
   3. Restart the services affected by the change
3. Upgrading Arvados

Commercial support

Arvados is 100% open source software. Anyone can download, install, maintain and upgrade it. However, if this is not something you want to spend your time and energy doing, Curii Corporation provides managed Arvados installations as well as commercial support for Arvados. Please contact info@curii.com for more information.

If you’d prefer to do things yourself, a few starting points for maintaining and upgrading Arvados can be found below.

Maintaining Arvados

After Arvados is installed, periodic configuration changes may be required to adapt the software to your needs. Arvados uses a unified configuration file, which is normally found at /etc/arvados/config.yml.

Making a configuration change to Arvados typically involves three steps:

• modification of the config.yml file
• distribution of the modified file to the machines in the cluster
• restarting of the services affected by the change

Modification of the config.yml file

Consult the configuration reference or another part of the documentation to identify the change to be made.

Preserve a copy of your existing configuration file as a backup, and make the desired modification.

Run arvados-server config-check to make sure the configuration file has no errors and no warnings.

Distribute the configuration file

We recommend to keep the config.yml file in sync between all the Arvados system nodes, to avoid issues with services running on different versions of the configuration.

Distribution of the configuration file can be done in many ways, e.g. scp, configuration management software, etc.

Restart the services affected by the change

If you know which Arvados service uses the specific configuration that was modified, restart those services. When in doubt, restart all Arvados system services.

Upgrading Arvados

Upgrading Arvados typically involves the following steps:

1. consult the upgrade notes and the release notes for the release you want to upgrade to
2. Wait for the cluster to be idle and stop Arvados services.
3. Make a backup of your database, as a precaution.
4. update the configuration file for the new release, if necessary (see Maintaining Arvados above)
5. rebuild and deploy the compute node image (cloud only)
6. Install new packages using apt-get upgrade or yum upgrade.
7. Wait for package installation scripts as they perform any necessary data migrations.
8. Verify that the Arvados services were restarted as part of the package upgrades.

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