Contribute: Plugins/StoragePluginsArkivum

Storage Plugin : Arkivum

In this tutorial we will look at installing the Arkivum Storage Plugin. This plugin allows you to use an alternative storage location and how to mount a Samba (CIFS/Windows) share to store that data.

This plugin was designed to mount the Arkivum Storage system, but could equally be used to store data on any CIFS/Samba system

Background

The Arkivum ePrints storage plugin allows content in an ePrints repository to be copied or moved into Arkivum’s data archiving service.

Arkivum provides online data archiving as a service to organisations that need to keep data for long-term compliance or reuse.

The company is a spin out of the University of Southampton and is based on a decade of expertise and technology created from working with large archives on digital preservation and long-term data retention and access. As part of the Arkivum service, three copies of customer data are held in three UK locations: two online in secure data centres and one offline in escrow with a third-party. Arkivum actively manages data integrity through regular checks and migrates media and infrastructure to counter obsolescence and to ensure prices remain low.

Good preservation practice, trained staff and very carefully controlled processes means that Arkivum can offer a guarantee of data integrity.

All data returned from our service is always bit-for-bit identical to the data the customer supplied, with no restrictions on time or volume. The guarantee is backed by worldwide insurance and is included in our contract and SLA. Arkivum is certified to ISO27001 and is regularly audited for the integrity, confidentiality and availability of data assets in our possession. This approach makes the Arkivum service ideal for long-term storage of research data, for example to meet research council retention requirements and to ensure it is available for easy access in the future.

For more information see www.arkivum.com including our series of articles and webinars on Research Data Management.

Installation

The A-Stor service is accessible using the SMB protocol (also known as CIFS). The A-Stor service does this through an appliance that is installed at the customer site that uses Samba to expose a network file share. This means that the A-Stor network share needs to be mounted on the server running ePrints so that the plugin to ePrints can copy files to the A-Stor network share and read files from the A-Stor network share.

Therefore, the installation process is one of mounting the smb network share on the ePrints server, making sure permissions are set properly so ePrints can read and write files to that share, installing the plugin and then testing that the plugin is visible and functioning correctly within ePrints.

Before You Start

​Install smbfs on the eprints server

apt-get install smbfs;# Debian
yum install cifs-utils;# Redhat

Note: Redhat uses cifs mounting rather than samba (so replace smbfs for cifs if using redhat

Make sure you have:

• Access to: /etc/fstab
• The UID of eprints and GID of the webserver group (likely to be www-data or apache)
• A directory and read/write access for the above user somewhere on the system

Preparing the directory

ON THE Arkivum Unit, or Samba Server

• Create the directory you want to mount the Astor Archive on to (eg /mnt/Archive)
• mkdir your_di​rectory
• edit /etc/fstab and add to the bottom:

//ASTOR_SERVER/astor /YOURDIR_ON_EPRINTS cifs defaults,guest,file_mode=0666,dir_mode=0777,uid=USERS_UID,gid=USERS_GID,forcegid,forceuid,rw 0 1

should you want to connect as ​​a specific domain user, use:​

//ASTOR_SERVER/astor /YOURDIR_ON_EPRINTS        cifs    defaults,sec=none,rw,soft,username=DOMAIN_USERNAME,password=DOMAIN_PASSWORD,dom=DOMAIN,uid=EPRINTS_UID,gid=APACHE_GID,forcegid,forceuid 0 0

• at the command line run: mount /YOURDIR_ON_EPRINTS
• running: df -h ; #will test to see if the mount succeeded

Configure Apache

On the Eprints Server

Remember to add the directory set as archive in the apache config file.

It should look like this:

<Directory "YOURDIR_ON_EPRINTS">
  Options FollowSymLinks
                  AllowOverride none
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
</Directory>​
  <Location "YOURDIR_ON_EPRINTS">
    PerlSetVar EPrints_ArchiveID fluffy

    Options +ExecCGI
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Location>

The Storage Plugin

You can download the storage plugin from here: [1]

Then edit the main file to decide your rules for using the storage plugin:

eprints3/lib/storage/default.xml

<store xmlns="http://eprints.org/ep3/storage" xmlns:epc="http://eprints.org/ep3/control">
        <epc:choose>
                <epc:when test="datasetid = 'document'">
                        <plugin name="ArkivumR"/>
                </epc:when>
                <epc:otherwise>
                        <plugin name="Local"/>
                </epc:otherwise>
            
        </epc:choose>
</store>

This example would use the Arkivum Plugin for documents, and the normal plugin for everything else.

Check in E-Prints

If the installation is successful, you should see the Akivum storage available by going here:

E-prints web page --> LOGIN --> ADMIN --> CONFIG TOOLS --> STORAGE MANAGER

(NB: if the file permissions are wrong, the storage wont show up)

For more information on Astor, see [www.arkivum.com] including our series of articles and webinars on Research Data Management.