A discussion on setting up the ALICE VOBox at Birmingham.
Introduction
The aim is to configure our grid resources at Birmingham to allow ALICE production jobs to run. The intention is to eventually support user analysis jobs as well. Instructions on how to setup a generic VOBox are available on the
GOC Twiki, and specific instructions for ALICE are available on the
AliEn Twiki.
Alice require a Cream CE and a VOBox, both of which need to be 64bit machines. This will follow shortly.
VOBox Installation
Machine Installation
The VOBox has been deployed as a 64 bit
virtual machine running SL 5.3. It has the name
epgr03.ph.bham.ac.uk
and the DN
epgr03.ph.bham.ac.uk/emailAddress=lcg-site-admin@hep.ph.bham.ac.uk
. The machine is configured using cfengine (known as the class
alice_vobox
, with configuration files stored in the
repo/alice_vobox
on
epgmo1
). The command
yum -y update
was issued before any further installation commenced.
The machine has been configured to use
ntpd
.
gLite Installation
Installation proceed by first downloading the
lcg-CA and
glite-VOBOX yum repo config files. The repos
sl-contrib
,
sl-srpms
and
dag
were also enabled.
The packages
lcg-CA
and
lcg-VOBOX
were installed using yum.
alpine
and
zsh
were also installed as standard.
Firewall settings
In addition to the normal Birmingham-enabled ports (ssh, cfengine etc), the following ports have been enabled:
Software Areas
Only the ALICE local cluster software area is available at the moment, NFS mounted to
epgr03:/egee/soft/alice
.
NOTE! This area is owned by
sgmali01:alicesgm
on epgsr1, and this user does not exist on epgr03!
Yaim Configuration
Users
Only one user has been configured on the VOBox:
Online the
vo.d/alice
config file has been transferred to the VOBox by cfengine.
Backup Policy
This node is not currently backed up. This will be reviewed in the New Year.
Testing
Port Availability
Tested with telnet (ie
telnet epgr03.ph.bham.ac.uk 1975
etc). Comparing with port availability on
vobox.egee.cesga.es
.
GSISSH
- Edit
/etc/grid-security/grid-mapfile
and map DN to alicesgm (ie add line "/C=UK/O=eScience/OU=Birmingham/L=ParticlePhysics/CN=christopher curtis" alicesgm
)
- Log onto node using gsissh:
gsissh -p 1975 epgr03.ph.bham.ac.uk
- $X509_USER_PROXY variable should be set after successful log in.
GridFTP?
The command
edg-gridftp-ls gsiftp://epgr03.ph.bham.ac.uk/tmp
may be used to check the
globus-gridftp
service is running.
Myproxy Retrieval
On lxplus, register a proxy certificate with the command
myproxy-init -s myproxy.cern.ch -d -n -t 48 -c 900
. Log onto the VOBox using gsissh and retrieve the proxy with the command
/opt/lcg/bin/vobox-proxy --vo atlas --proxy-safe 10000 --myproxy-safe 20000 ---voms alice:/alice/Role=lcgadmin -email cjc@hep.ph.bham.ac.uk register
This test fails at the moment because the VOBox has not been registered properly in the myproxy server at CERN. Emailed px.support@cern.ch for advice!
Site BDII
The VOBox has been entered into the site BDII information by adding the line:
BDII_VOBOX_URL="ldap://epgr03.ph.bham.ac.uk:2170/mds-vo-name=resource,o=grid"
to the
site_bdii/site-info.def
file. Yaim has been re-run on the site BDII.
Storage Element
ALICE require xrootd to be installed on the Storage Element.
--
ChristopherCurtis - 29 Jul 2009