First access to t2b

There are a few steps to gain access to the T2:

• First thing to know: our contact mail is grid_admin AT listserv.vub.be . Please always send mails to this list and not to personnal emails, this way everyone here can respond and keep up-to-date with problems. To facilitate discussions, you can also contact us through our chat: chat.iihe.ac.be , channel #IT-support-T2B.

Getting access

• Now, to get access to our T2, send us a mail with the following (EVERYTHING IS MANDATORY):
  1. You need to add your promotor/boss in cc
  2. Use your preferred contact email, as it is the one we will keep to contact you
  3. Introduce yourself briefly, with AT LEAST those informations:

• Full Name
• University
• research group/experiment

4. Add the login name you want to use. If you have a CERN account, it needs to be the same (even if said account is not enabled anymore).

5. Finally, copy-paste the content of your PUBLIC ssh key in the mail, in order to have access to our User Interfaces (UIs, or often called the mX machines). Help debugging ssh connections can be found here. To create a pair of ssh keys if you don't have one already, do the following:

in a shell type:
>  ssh-keygen -t ecdsa
and follow the instructions. The defaults suggested are fine. 
Just make sure to choose a strong password!

this will create 2 files in the following directory: 
> ll $HOME/.ssh
-rw------- 1 rougny rougny    411 avr 29  2019 id_ecdsa
-rw-r--r-- 1 rougny rougny    102 avr 29  2019 id_ecdsa.pub


You need to send us the content of id_ecdsa.pub, which is your public key. The other is your private key and should never be shared!

[IMPORTANT] Make a backup somewhere of the content of the .ssh directory. If you copy this directory over to a new laptop, you access will continue to work.

6. [OPTIONAL] If you already have a certificate, please add your DN to the mail. The DN is given by the content of "Identity" when issuing the command voms-proxy-info.

• [IMPORTANT] You need to register to the t2b user mailing-list. This is where we make important announcements to our users.
  1. If you are not part of CERN, create an external lightweight account
     (If you are part of the SoLid or the IceCube mailing lists, you should already receive our communication and can skip the whole procedure)
  2. Go to the request page
  3. search for the e-group beginning with belgian-t2-users
  4. then hit the button subscribe
  5. If any of this fails, ask someone to contact the mailinglist admins (or ask them to send a mail to this list with your request)

• [EQUALLY IMPORTANT]

We have a page were outages are tracked and announced:

https://status.iihe.ac.be/

We encourage you to subscribe to the updates of this page (see button at the bottom of the page)

Next Steps

• If you need a grid certificate, follow this twiki page
  • IMPORTANT: you need a grid certificate to be able to write to our mass storage system from other sites. Required for users in CMS.

• Now that you have access to our T2, read the following:
  1. Presentation of our cluster : please have a careful look at this page !
  2. Local job submission
     
     

  ... everything else you might need on the wiki front page