Manchester AFS on WN

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At Manchester, and other sensible sites, the worker nodes run afs client. It is possible then to use afs for input, output and the software environment, i.e. it can be used to access files in the manchester afs system. You can just cd to your favourite home directory and run jobs as if you were there. This is an alternative to installing the software on the site, or putting everything into one big tarball.

You do this using the gssklog command - a grid-enabled version of klog which does not need a password as it uses your grid certificate proxy instead. In principle you should be able to say

gssklog -cell hep.man.ac.uk -principal <your local username>
cd /afs/hep.man.ac.uk/u/<your local user name>/<your usual work directory>

In practice there are at the moment various workarounds. The following works (I can explain the reasons for it all if you really want to know, but you probably don't).

scp <pool acccount>@ce02.tier2.hep.manchester.ac.uk:$X509_USER_PROXY myproxy
export X509_USER_PROXY=/home/<pool account>/myproxy
gssklog -cell hep.man.ac.uk -principal <your local username> -server afs3.hep.man.ac.uk -port 5750
cd /afs/hep.man.ac.uk/u/<your local user name>/<your usual work directory>

and then life is just like it is back home. Your program and data files will all be found in their usual places.

(I sometimes have to copy the occasional shared library across by hand)

This makes life easy. However R*E*A*L grid users regard it as too easy and therefore cheating, and will sneer at you for not doing things the hard way.

Roger john barlow 17:56, 8 Aug 2007 (BST)