Verify that your Service is running and accessible

Running vs. Accessible

By deploying a service to a container and starting that container, the service is running. However, this does not mean it is accessible. To successfully advertise to the Index Service (and subsequently, by others on the Grid), there are two steps to complete:

• (Advertisement or running to advertise to the Index service) The service must successfully "register" to the Index Service; the service must be able to connect to the Index Service. This simply means the service will show up in the list of services registered, but does not mean it will be "discoverable." The primary requirement for this step is that you deploy the service to a machine that has an internet connection (assuming you need to us the Internet to contact your target Grid's index service).
• (Aggregation, or being accessible to the Index service) The service's metadata must be able to be retrieved and aggregated by the Index Service; the Index Service must be able to connect to the service. The primary requirement for this step is to open a firewall port so that all Grid entities (essentially, anyone) can contact your Grid service on the port that you specified during container configuration.

A grid service is accessible only when it successfully completes both Advertisement and Aggregation. This means it is properly configured so that the service can advertise to the Index Service, and the index service can aggregate the service's metadata. There must be a bi-directional flow of information.

This combination of advertisement and aggregation is illustrated in the diagram below.

Start the service

After deployment, it is necessary to start the container to make it available on the grid. To begin, we will open a terminal and start up the grid service container to make the service available.

• Open a terminal and change directory to your container locations bin directory and start the container.

Example for Tomcat:

%> cd %CATALINA_HOME%\bin

%>startup.bat

Verifying the Grid Service is Running

Once the container is started you will be able to verify that the service is running with a few validation steps you can go through on the local machine that you deployed the service from. Simply open a web browser and point to your service's URL.

Example:

You should see a "Hi there, this is an Axis Service" message. If you do, then congratulations! Your service is running! If you do not see this message, then please see troubleshooting to investigate further.

In addition, ensure that you can request metadata properly from your service on the same machine:

On Windows-based systems, run this command (replacing your service's URL):

%GLOBUS_LOCATION%\bin\wsrf-get-property.bat -a -z none -s <YOUR_SERVICE'S URL> {gme://caGrid.caBIG/1.0/gov.nih.nci.cagrid.metadata}ServiceMetadata

On Unix-based systems, run this command (replacing your service's URL):

$GLOBUS_LOCATION/bin/wsrf-get-property -a -z none -s <YOUR_SERVICE'S URL> {gme://caGrid.caBIG/1.0/gov.nih.nci.cagrid.metadata}ServiceMetadata

Verify that the Grid service is accessible from the Grid

Once your service is running, you can verify that your service is accessible by contacting your service from a machine that is outside your firewall.

First, open the port in your firewall. Then, open a web browser from a machine outside of the firewall and point to your service's URL:

Example:

After running this command, if you see the "Hi, there is an Axis service" message displayed, then congratulations! Your service is running and accessible!