ARC1/Client installation and usage

NOTE: This page is out of date and is kept for purely historical reasons.

Installation

Installation via Yum

Note: Valid for RedHat, Fedora and OpenSUSE

ARC1 client and related packages can be installed via the NorduGrid Yum repository. Once your repository is configured, execute:

  yum install nordugrid-arc1-client

Most likely you would like to use the same client tools to work with the current production ARC (e.g. 0.6 or 0.8). To enable this, install also the necessary Globus packages:

  yum install nordugrid-arc1-plugins-globus

Certificates to access Grid

In order to access Grid resources, you need the following:

1. Personal Grid key and certificate, see e.g. notes on accessing Grid resources
2. Membership in a Virtual Organisation (VO), see e.g. an overview of VOs
3. Every time you start a Grid session, you have to create a temporary proxy certificate (a.k.a. the proxy)

While steps (1) and (2) are common for all kinds of Grid middlewares and infrastructures, proxy creation in step (3) id different for different Grids.

Personal key and certificate are normally

In all likelihood, your credentials (personal certificate and key) are installed in ~/.globus/usercert.pem and ~/.globus/userkey.pem respectively. In order to create the proxy with ARC1 client tools, issue the following:

  arcproxy -C ~/.globus/usercert.pem -K ~/.globus/userkey.pem -P ~/myproxy

This will create a temporary proxy certificate in the ~/myproxy file. You can specify any destination location for the proxy.

Note: arcproxy knows no default location for user credentials: neither for personal certificates, nor for the proxy

It is convenient to define in your shell initialization file (such as e.g. ~/.bashrc) the environment variables for default credential locations - then you can simply call arcproxy without command line options:

  export X509_USER_CERT=$HOME/.globus/usercert.pem
  export X509_USER_KEY=$HOME/.globus/userkey.pem
  export X509_USER_PROXY=~/myproxy

If you have another Grid client already installed (like gLite UI or ARC client), you can create the proxy either using grid-proxy-init -rfc or voms-proxy-init -rfc (the same as voms-proxy-init -proxyver 4):

  grid-proxy-init -rfc

Note: ARC1 in general requires so-called RFC-compliant proxies.

For security reasons, you may wish to limit your proxy validity time, using one of the following commands (all examples are for 12 hours validity period):

  arcproxy -c validityPeriod=43200
  grid-proxy-init -rfc -valid 12:00

Job submission

Production ARC job submission

Current production ARC infrastructure uses primarily XRSL language for job description. See XRSL manual for more details.

You have to explicitly tell to the ARC1 client that you wish to use production ARC resources by specifying ARC0 prefix and the preferred indexing service (see the list of known production indexing servies):

  arcsub -i ARC0:ldap://index1.nordugrid.org:2135/Mds-Vo-name=NorduGrid,o=grid testjob.xrsl