Experiences with implementing the SRM protocol and configuring and packaging modular systems

In this paper, we present our experiences with implementing a storage element using the storage resource manager, or SRM protocol. The implementation builds on work done in EU DataGrid. The purpose of this paper is twofold: we describe our post-EDG experiences with implementing Web services in general and SRM in particular, and the lessons learned, and we also describe our configuration and packaging systems. This work is of interest to anyone implementing Web services over GSI and to people working with grid interfaces to storage or storage protocols. It is also of interest to people building and deploying modular software on Linux platforms.