HOWTO get your jobs to run on the Grid

Introduction

What I'm going to outline below is how I got my jobs to run on the Grid and what I need to do it. I'll try to include documentation where I can and fixes for other OS's. My OSG client machine is a Debbian Lenny distro here at the University of Regina. It was a random machine I had available but the OSG software works fine on it. (It didn't on my Mandriva 2010 distro on my desktop.) This was a month's worth of trial and error fixing bugs and firewall issues with Richard Jones, but we have most of them worked out and everything has been running fine for the last week or so.

Step 1: Getting your Grid Certificate

The security for the grid is quite robust and as such, a signed certificate from a known signing authority is needed. As I am working in Canada, I used Westgrid to get my certificate from [ http://www.gridcanada.ca/ca/index.html Grid Canada] under a project already registered at the UofR. You will require a sponsor who will verify that you are part of their project if you are not the project leader. It took 2-3 weeks to get my certificate since people at Westgrid were on holidays at the time. Normally is should take a few days.

The DOE will also provide certificates. You can follow the instructions here.

When my Westgrid account was finally setup, I was given a key pair (two files). For security and use on the Grid I converted these into a .p12 file.