Revision as of 16:05, 25 March 2014

How to use Combo

To start to use combo - our group cluster, you need to know something about it. The detail manual could be download from File:Combo Manual.pdf.

How to Log in Combo

Use PuTTY on Windows or Terminal on Linux, login using your account and password. You need to use some specific IP address to access combo.

Only secured (ssh) connections to combo are supported. All insecure methods of connection (rlogin, rsh, telnet) are disabled. You will log on to the master node and you should be in your home directory which is also accessible by compute nodes.

If your local computer system does not support SSH, please install the SSH software [ SSH or Open SSH] before connecting to combo. For Microsoft Windows system, a free client called PuTTY is available here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

First thing you need to do after first login

Change your password, in command line, type

$ passwd

to change your password. A good password will have a mix of lower- and upper-case characters, numbers, and punctuation marks, and should be at least 6 characters long. Some people like to put a punctuation mark/number in the middle of a word, e.g., Ha&pp6Y.

Second thing you need to do

You need to change ~/.bashrc file so that you can use the apps in shared folder easily, type

$ cp /share/apps/useful/setup/_.bashrc ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.bashrc

to replace bashrc with prepared file. Then use this code to sync .bashrc to all nodes:

for i in compute-0-0 compute-0-2 compute-0-3 compute-0-4 compute-0-5 compute-0-6 compute-0-7 compute-0-8 compute-0-9 compute-0-10 compute-0-11 compute-0-12 compute-0-13 compute-0-14 compute-0-15 compute-0-16 ; do scp ~/.bashrc ${i}:~/ ; done
for i in compute-0-0 compute-0-2 compute-0-3 compute-0-4 compute-0-5 compute-0-6 compute-0-7 compute-0-8 compute-0-9 compute-0-10 compute-0-11 compute-0-12 compute-0-13 compute-0-14 compute-0-15 compute-0-16 ; do ssh ${i} source ~/.bashrc ; done

Backup your things

We should emphasize the different levels of importance of computer data. Most of the data on combo are generated by programs, and could be regenerated, in case of necessity. The source code, on the other hand, are very precious to the developers, and could not easily be regenerated. It is your responsibility to back up critical data! Please maintain your own copy of important data stored in the cluster. Users are highly recommended to do everything possible for ensuring those critical material (programs etc.) never be lost. For example, the users should keep multiple copies of these important files on different computer systems, including users' local system. The following example illustrates a directory move from combo:

• Create a copy of the local directory with tar (the time to do this depends upon the sizes and number of files, etc.):

tar -cvf name-of-your-file.tar directory_to_be_transfer

• Compress tar file with gzip (this step may not be necessary if your file is small):

gzip name-of-your-file.tar

This creates a compressed tar file with the name name-of-your-file.tar.gz

• Now put the tarball somewhere safe. Maybe a local driver or another server.
• Anytime you may move the tarball back to combo and untar:

tar -zxvf name-of-your-file.tar