Computing Account and Certificate - comrademarvin/SA-ALICE-O2 GitHub Wiki

Even though all the O2 github repositories are publicly available and can in theory be installed by anyone, the relevant permissions are required to run the software meaningfully and access the required resources from the Grid/CCDB.

1. Computing Account:

The first critical step is to have access to a CERN computing account. It is the responsibility of the group lead to register students for the relevant computing account. This will also require the completion of a short security course, which will be communicated via email when the account registration is submitted. Once finalised, the account can be managed at CERN Account Management.

2. Grid Certificate:

Once a computing account is obtained, this allows for the user to access a grid certificate - can be downloaded at Certificate Management .

The certificate can be uploaded to the browser to access sites like MonALISA.

When running O2, it is also required to export the certificate and private key into the ~/.globus directory (create it if it doesn't already exist), using the openssl commands - more detailed instructions can be found at Get a Grid certificate. This only has to be done once for each system, but will have to be repeated when the certificate expires.

Once this is successfully done, the alien-token-init command can be used within the O2 environment to gain a token to allow O2 access to the Grid/CCDB. The token has a short lifetime, so this needs to be repeated each time when loading the O2 environment.