Getting Started as a CERN-PPS site Admin at CERN

User and VO membership

As a pre-requisite you should be registered as CERN User (AFS account) and have a valid Globus certificate. If you do not own a valid certificate please follow the procedure in LCG User registration

You also need to be registered in the dteam VO, in particular in the VO group dteam/CERN with Maite Barroso Lopez as reference person. Please find the details of the registration procedure in the dteam VOMRS server

Optionally you could register to the Picard VO, which is a dummy VO largely used in PPS. Check in the PPS wiki for details.

Know what the team is supposed to do.

The CERN_PPS site is the CERN Pre-Production site. Administrators working in this team are supposed to:

1. Install and maintain the middleware services, resources and special operations activities to be run at CERN_PPS site according to deployment decisions coming from the PPS Coordination team.
2. Keep the machines up-to date with security updates coming from the CERN central IT service.
3. Support PPS users within the special VO activities concerning CERN_PPS
4. Follow-up and solve GGUS tickets addressed to the CERN_PPS site
5. Follow the PPS service mailing list: "hot topics", decisions, meetings, new releases, deployment decisions are usually forwarded to this list.
6. Participate to the PPS Operations Meetings. They are not held on regular basis, but approximatively once per month and they are called through the PPS mailing list.
7. Share as much as possible configuration information with other PPS sites through the PPS wiki

All the tasks above should be accomplished in observance of the existing SLA between the PPS-CERN site and the PPS Coordination Group.

Know who is working with you

• Team members and their roles are described here

If you need to contact them please do so in the given order.

Know which machines you are going to work on: the LCG Node Status Page

The LCG Node Status Page is where you will find and update information on all the PPS nodes at CERN. To be able to update information you will need to get write access. If you want simply to view the page before you are registered use the link:

LCG Node Status Page

After you have been registered, assure that your Globus certificate is loaded into your browser and then use the link:

LCG Node Status Page

Select Pre Prod in the Cluster: combobox and then push button Send to obtain the nodes from the PPS-CERN.

Get write access to the LCG Node Status Page

Send an e-mail to Laurence Field explaining who you are and ask for write access to the node status page for the pre-production team.

You need to attach to your e-mail your DN (Distinguished Name) It is the Subject in your Globus certificate ~/.globus/usercert.pem (It is better to put Nick in CC in this e-mail).

Log to machines in the Pre-Production site

You need your ssh public key to be put in the authorized_keys file of all the machines. To this end, you should:

• generate an ssh key pair (if you don't have already one):

• send your public key to Antonio Retico explaining who you are and asking to insert your key in the firewall configuration tool

Later on, you will be able to use this key in order to access nodes running services which you are responsible for based on the firewall configuration.

Get write access to the pre-production afs area

The afs area where all the shared data of the pre-production team are kept is: /afs/cern.ch/project/gd/egee

In order to have write permission on this area send an e-mail to Antonio Retico and ask for write access to the area of interest. You need to specify your afs user name. (It is better to put Nick in CC).

Get familiar with the PPS web site

Most information about the PPS service is stored on the PPS web site

http://www.cern.ch/PPS

you can find there also a link (right bottom) to PPS sites, among which CERN_PPS

Get familiar with the PPS wiki

The old entry point to the PPS was on the PPS wiki pages. The public part is available at

http://pps-public-wiki.egee.cesga.es/cgi-bin/moin.cgi

and the private pages can be accessed through

https://pps-private-wiki.egee.cesga.es/cgi-bin/moin.cgi

Get access to the "private area" of the PPS wiki

As dteam member you should automatically be allowed. If not ask access by contacting contact egee-admins@cesgaNOSPAMPLEASE.es with pps-support@cernNOSPAMPLEASE.ch in CC (and then modify this page)

Register to the GOC dB

In order to have the permission to insert new nodes on the GOC db and/or to change PPS-CERN site information, you need to be registered in the GOC db as a site administrator for PPS-CERN. For this to happen, you need to visit https://goc.gridops.org/role/request and request a Site Administrator role in CERN_PPS object. Please send an e-mail to Antonio to notify him about the request.

Register to the relevant mailing lists

Using the listbox service at CERN subscribe to the following mailing lists

• project-eu-egee-pre-production-service --> pre-production service
• grid-cern-pps-site-admins --> CERN pre-production site Admins

A lot of useful information can be usually found also in

• glite-discuss --> Free discussions about gLite middleware

but consider that you could also get a lot of noise from there.

Ask for something to do.

Now you are ready to start working in the team and you can talk to Antonio or Nick (in this order), to be given your first task.

-- AntonioRetico - 17 Jan 2008