GlueX-related shared accounts on the JLab CUE

From GlueXWiki
Revision as of 19:10, 8 February 2019 by Marki (Talk | contribs) (Uses of the GlueX Project accounts)

Jump to: navigation, search

We have a set of accounts on the JLab CUE for gluex-related tasks that are generally helpful for the entire collaboration. They are all members of the "halld" unix group. The "gluex" account is for general system administration tasks and the "gxprojx" (gluex project) accounts are for large-scale computing tasks, especially those using the batch farm.

Uses of the gluex account

Some of these tasks are run in cron jobs. By having them in a group account we can have more than one person have access to the crontab and the scripts, and it facilitates having a standard environment, i. e., it frees individuals to change the environment in their private accounts at will and not worry about breaking public jobs.

Another task is creating the standard builds of the offline software. Since all the files are owned by the system account, indiviual users cannot inadvertently overwrite or modify these builds.

Uses of the GlueX Project accounts

Mainly for submitting jobs to the batch farm, users gxprojN have elevated privilege on the farm relative to normal "halld" group accounts. The offline software working group allocates these accounts for large-scale computing tasks as they arise.

Account Project Contact Person Date Assigned
gxproj1 Offline Monitoring of incoming data Alex Austregesilo December 2014
gxproj2 PrimEx Calibration Ilya Larin November 2018
gxproj3 Calibrations/EventStore Sean Dobbs January 2015
gxproj4 NERSC Running David Lawrence September 2018
gxproj5 Offline Monitoring and REST Production Alex Austregesilo May 2015
gxproj6 Analysis Launches Alex Austregesilo January 2018
gxproj7 DIRC Commissioning Jobs Justin Stevens January 2018

How to log into the accounts

These accounts do not have passwords; they are accessed exclusively by ssh using your public/private key pair. To log into an account you have to have your public key on file in the target account's home directory tree in the file /home/<gluex-account>/.ssh/authorized_keys. Contact the Software Coordinator (or any person who currently has access to the account of interest) to have your public key added.

Setting up email forwarding for these accounts

First note that placing a .forward file in the home directory of these accounts will have no effect. To have email sent to one of these accounts forwarded to another address, we have to ask the Helpdesk to do it for us. This is mainly useful for cron jobs. Note that there is an interface on the Computer Center pages for setting forwarding addresses for standard user accounts; that won't work for these accounts since they do not have passwords.