Initiating Teragrid Sessions Raghu Reddy

Outline Motivation Initial Setup –Certificates –Proxies –Grid-map file entries and DNs Softenv for customizing your environment

Motivation Now that you have an account on the Teragrid … –TeraGrid can be more than the sum of its parts –More than single sign-on – A common/consistent environment –A common environment to the extent possible TG_CLUSTER_SCRATCH TG_COMMUNITY TG_EXAMPLES … –Setting up the initial environment can be a little confusing!

Initial Setup for Authentication Certificates/Proxies/DNs … (Terms you need to know) –Certificate Your long term identity A couple of files in “.globus/*.pem” files Use of Certificates/Proxies allow you to login without worrying about passwords on all the different platforms on the TG –Proxy Your short term identity This is what is used to do authentication without passwords with globus tools such as gsissh, tgcp, globus-url-copy, etc. –DN (Distinguished Name) Certificates and Proxies have your “DN” encoded in them –Grid-mapfile Various TG hosts have your “DN” in their grid-mapfile if you are authorized to use that particular resource

How do you get a Proxy? Using a long term certificate The easiest way is to start is to get a Certificate on one of the NCSA Teragrid Resources (done just once) –Login to an NCSA system –Use “grid-cert-request” command (use –help for help) The DN from NCSA cert is already included in the grid-mapfiles of appropriate platforms Once you have certificate, you use “grid-proxy-init” to get a proxy Using a KCA proxy If you have an account at any of the sites that have KCA, then you can get a proxy without getting a long term certificate The sequence of commands are: –Kinit kx509; kxlist With this approach, you will have to add your DN to the gridmap file of various resources. The User Portal will simply this process in the future

Accepted Certificates Authorities Currently the Teragrid Accepts the following CAs –Italian Grid –Japan AIST –Dutch Grid –UK E-Science –NCSA –PSC (No long term User Certs) –SDSC –TACC –USC (No long term User Certs) –Purdue –DoE

Myproxy Repository How do you get a Proxy at resource where you don’t have a certificate? –If you don’t want to manage your certificates at multiple resources, you can use the myproxy server to store your proxy, and retrieve from another site. –Detailed talk on this subject on Wed 11:00 AM –Alternatively you can use KCA as mentioned before

For more information If you are just getting started, a good place to start for authentication issues is:

Softenv What is Softenv – The “.soft” file –A way to manage working env on different platforms –Makes it easy for users to change env (PATH etc.) –Makes it easy for admins to add new software –Most of the time you don’t need to worry about it –You manage this by editing the “.soft” file in your home directory Equivalent to the “.cshrc” or the “.bashrc” files you already know about!

Example Suppose you want to use Totalview-2.3 instead of the default Totalview –Add “+totalview-2.3” to the top of the “.soft” file –Next time you login, this will be the default totalview you get –If want it to take effect this session, then you run the command “resoft” –Even if the admins change the default, this is the one you will be getting when you run totalview

What does the “.soft” file contain? The “.soft” file can consist of the following –Comments: Begin with #, similar to most shells # This is a comment in a.soft file –Packages: Allow you to add specific software +hdf4 –Macros: To set a bunch of –Env variables PATH += ${HOME}/bin What Macros/Keywords are available? Use the “softenv” command to get a listing

What Else? Like any scripting language, there is more! –Pre defined env variables –Conditional statements –Softenv commands such as resoft soft add Etc. –For additional information The man page “man softenv-intro”

Questions?