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Getting your account

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In order to get your account at CNAF, you need to follow the procedure outlined below. This new procedure is slightly more complicated than it used to be in the past, but unfortunately there is nothing we (ARGO and CNAF) can do about it since it is a consequence of the anti-terrorism laws which have become effective in Italy recently.

  • carefully read the INFN-CNAF AUP (Acceptable User Policy)c
  • print the Authorization to Access form and fill it:
    • put Anna Karen Calabrese Melcarne as INFN-CNAF contact person
    • provide at least a couple of alternatives for the preferred user-ID
    • if you are not an INFN associate, add the name of your supervisor
  • sign the form and fax it to the following fax number: +39 051 6092 747
    • if you are not an INFN associate, make a xerox copy of your identity card or any other valid identification document (passport is strongly preferred though), and send it together with the previous signed form (if possible, provide a magnified xerox copy to improve readibility)
  • after you've sent the fax, write an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (and send carbon copy to Fulvio Galeazzi) asking for the account activation: let CNAF administrators know you have already sent by fax the required documentation

In case you don't get a feedback from CNAF within a week, please inform Fulvio.
After successfully getting the email from CNAF saying that your account is active, verify that you can login on both the bastion and the Argo front-end machines (read below).

Logging in at CNAF

So you've finally got your password for CNAF and are ready to waste CPU time...
The first important thing to note is that logging in at CNAF is a two-step process. The computing nodes are on a protected network, and are not directly accessible from outside.
You first need to ssh to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. This machine (actually, it is a pool of machines behind a generic name) should not be used for anything other than to hop on the user interface. You will have some disk space on bastion, but note that it is not backed-up, so don't keep anything important on bastion.
From bastion you can ssh to ui01-lcg.cr.cnaf.infn.it using the same userID, of course. From this machine you have access to the batch system, you have some disk space for your home, and you can also access Argo NFS area.

User Interface usage policy

The User Interface is not meant for intensive interactive work: if you have such (very legitimate) needs, you should use the batch system.
Moreover, note that Argo is not the only user of this machine, so please make a little effort and adopt strategies which cause little impact on other users. For example, if you need to run a short but intensive interactive work, use nice, like in:
nice -15 your_executable
where your_executable might, for example, be a piece of Root code which runs on ROOT files.
Important: users often have scripts which run the same executable on different files. A common mistake is that user "nice" the script, whereas they should "nice" the executable called by the script!

Setting up your account

A common environment has been setup for you, which will bring you several benefits:
  • setting of some environment variables, like ARGOSOFT (defining where Argo software is installed at CNAF), ARGODATA (defining the root directory for data available on NFS disks), CVSROOT (pointing to Lecce repository),...
  • definitions for CERN libraries and ROOT, see below
  • additions to your PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PERL5LIB
As you see these settings are harmless and very useful. To get them, you just need to:
bash users
at some point in your ~/.bashrc add the following lines: 
# Source ARGO definitions
if [ -f /opt/exp_software/argo/etc/bashrc ]; then
    . /opt/exp_software/argo/etc/bashrc
fi
tcsh users
at some point in your ~/.tcshrc add the following lines: 
# Source ARGO definitions
 if ( -e /opt/exp_software/argo/etc/tcshrc ) then
    source /opt/exp_software/argo/etc/tcshrc
endif
Some of these definitions can be overridden. For example, the common environment sets "pro" as the preferred version for Cern libraries and ROOT, but you can override this by setting variables $CERN_LEVEL and $ROOT_LEVEL to any other version among those installed at CNAF (check the directories $CERN and $ROOTBASE to see what the available choices are).

Additional information