Grid Proxy/Credential set up

Check list for making sure your grid-credential files and setup is correct:

1. Make sure you have non-expired grid credential files in your .globus directory
1. usercert.pem
2. userkey.pem
2. Be sure you have your proxy on myproxy.teragrid.org (or wherever you need to keep it)
1. myproxy-init -s myproxy.teragrid.org
3. Make sure your ".globus/certificates" folder has the right certificates files, get them from your CA's certificates folder and makes sure you have all of the ones listed in the CA's folder.
4. Remove any ".r0" files in your ".globus/certificates" folder. These are unnecessary.
   

Runtime error checking

The question often arises, which error messages should one check for to make sure everything is working?
The following are the runtime error message patterns I am checking for using JMeter (via Assertion Response):

Portlet (gpir-browser-2) specific:

• "Error message" <-- Appears in most exception messages
• "An error has occurred!" <-- Appears in most exception messages
• "Stack Trace:" <-- Appears in most exception messages
• "Portlet Exception" <-- Appears in most exception messages
• "at java.lang.Thread.run" <--- appears in most java exception messages
• "Portlet unavailable!" <-- caused by a misconfigured portlet pom.xml file
• "Error contacting web service" <-- caused by incorrect webservice URL in portlet.xml for gpir-browser-2 portlet
• "The requested resource.*is not available" <-- caused by incorrectly configuring portlet in web.xml
  

Main gridsphere page specific:

• "GridSphere portal failed to initialize!" <-- Caused by a misconfigured pom.xml file
• "Stack Trace:" <-- Appears in most exception messages

Maintaining login session with JMeter

I was facing a problem where I was testing my Gridsphere based portal with JMeter, but the only page that was getting recorded was the page immedietely after the login screen. All the other pages (when simulated using JMeter) only showed the login screen when they should have actually shown some content. Basically the problem was that the "login session" was not being maintained across the JMeter thread, and only the first page (because the user entered login/password information) showed up in JMeter's simulation.

The way to maintain "login session" is to add a "HTTP Cookie Manager" to the thread group.
Go: Thread Group->Add->Config Element->HTTP Cookie Manager

And select your browser type.

Fixed error of gridsphere not loading

With Marlon's help, fixed the problem of getting to the Gridsphere login page, and seeing this error message:

GridSphere portal failed to initialize!

Unable to create portlet web application: portlets-driver Stack Trace:
Unable to create portlet web application: portlets-driver Caused by: Unable to load portlets from: portlets-driver + due to mapping error!

Problem was that I had run the command: mvn install from the "portlets" directory and not the root directory of the OGCE installation. So remember to always run mvn install or mvn compile from the top-most directory.

JMeter proxy w/ localhost server

Seems to be some configuration problem. When I'm using JMeter's proxy, it only seems to record responses from non-local servers. For example, google.com and yahoo.com will record results in JMeter, but nothing from localhost seems to be recording.

Possible explainations:

• JMeter only handles HTTP responses, ie only things from servers running on port 80 (but I have apache2 running on port 80, why doesn't anything record from that?)
  

JMeter proxy success

I was able to get a JMeter test-plan to work via JMeter's proxy server.
I used the following tutorial to do it:
http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/usermanual/jmeter_proxy_step_by_step.pdf
A few questions still in my mind, hopefully I'll have an answer soon:

• Why was it necessary to specify 'jakarta.apache.org' in the HTTP Request Defaults section? Does this make sure that only traffic to/from this server is recorded?
• What is the aggregate report doing? What do the numbers mean exactly?
  

First Post

This blog will include relevant discussion on JMeter testing, Grid Portlets, and NMI testbed.