Environment

Log in to your account. Then log in to our grid front-end grid3.bccs.uib.no. The easiest way from FAKLAB is to use something similar to this:

ssh -Y yourusername@grid3.bccs.uib.no

Once logged in there you can start terminal windows from there (xterm, gnome-terminal, etc). The '-Y' means that you will be able to run x windows applications.

Your environment should automatically be initialised with correctly set environment variables.

Certificates

You will be allocated a certificate/key pair during the course. Download these, called usercert.pem and userkey.pem, and place them in your .globus folder. If this folder does not exist then you should create it with

mkdir .globus

In your home directory. We have set up the environment so that this is created for you automatically when you log in.

To obtain the certificate allocated to you, execute similar to the following commands:

cd .globus
cp ~jeremy/coursecerts/1/*.pem .  (or 2, 3, 4 etc)
chmod 600 .globus/userkey.pem

This last step (chmod) is important - think about why that is!

Certificate Proxy

In order to gain access to the grid, you need to prepare a proxy certificate. This is essentially a copy of your user certificate with a short lifetime (usually several hours). This proxy is used by the middleware to authenticate you at various stages of submitting a job, querying etc.

Since we are part of a virtual organisation and the gLite middleware is heavily dependent on virtual organisations, we need to create a proxy with this information. For this course all of the user certificates are subscribed to the NEGTB VO. You can create a proxy certificate like this:

voms-proxy-init -voms negtb

You will be prompted for a passphrase, which will be given to you by the course presenter.