LOCKSS 2.0-alpha5 Available for Testing

The LOCKSS Program is pleased to announce that LOCKSS 2.0-alpha5, the fifth publicly available prototype of our next-generation distributed digital preservation software suite, is now available for testing.

First and foremost on many people's mind: due to fortunate timing, all system components and the custom Solr and OpenWayback Docker containers included in LOCKSS 2.0-alpha5 contain only the latest version of Log4j (2.16.0), which is not vulnerable to CVE-2021-44228 ("Log4Shell"), CVE-2021-45046 and CVE-2021-4104.

In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements throughout the system, this new iteration features:

• Numerous bug fixes and substantial performance improvements in the LOCKSS Repository Service, in support of reliability, scalability, and LOCKSS 1.x to 2.x migration.
• An improved LOCKSS Installer distributed without requiring Git, rolling up most individual installation steps into a single script.
• Upgrade from Solr 7.2.1 to Solr 8.9.0.
• Revamped HTTP error response handling, including new HTTP response/error categories and custom handling of categories in plugins.
• Added support for communicating with APIs via POST requests during crawls.

We welcome the community's input. We invite developers to read the release notes, try out the installation instructions or upgrade from 2.0-alpha4 to 2.0-alpha5, and provide us with feedback.

Thib Guicherd-Callin
Program Manager, LOCKSS Program