Overview FAQ

  1. My problem isn't in the FAQ or the other documents. What do I do? You can contact the OGCE team by email: discuss@ogce.org, or visit the OGCE website, http://www.collab-ogce.org/.
  2. Which release should I use? The OGCE 2 2.0 release is based on the JSR 168 portlet standard. The OGCE 1 release is based on Jetspeed 1.4 and CHEF 1.0.
  3. What's the difference between OGCE2 1.0 and 2.0? Both releases are based on JSR 168 compatible portlets. OGCE2 2.0 includes more portlets (Condor, SRB, Sakai) and more packaging to help you get things up and running in a single download and a single installation step. OGCE2 1.0 requires more work to download and build.
  4. What is the difference between OGCE2 and OGCE1? OGCE1 was based on the CHEF 1.0 and Jetspeed 1.4 frameworks. These predate the JSR 168 portlet standard, so OGCE1 portlets are not compatible with the OGCE2 releases. We do however provide support for Velocity JSR 168 portlets, so you can migrate OGCE 1 components to OGCE 2.
  5. What's your relationship to Sakai? GridSphere? uPortal? We are separate projects from each of these. We have some team overlap with the Sakai project (through the University of Michigan), who have contributed Sakai client portlets that can use Sakai collaboration tools as backend services. The OGCE primarily builds portlets, Grid client tools, and Web services, so we can work with different (standard compliant) portlet containers, including GridSphere, uPortal, Jetspeed2, and others. We are not directly connected to either uPortal or GridSphere but have chosen to focus on these containers for our project in OGCE2's 1.0 and 2.0 releases, respectively.
  6. Why are the downloads so large? The portal downloads for OGCE 1 and OGCE 2.0 include everything (almost) that you need to run the portal. See the installation instructions for more details.
  7. What operating systems, Java versions, and grid services can I use with the portal? In short, you should use Java 1.4.2. Complete Java 1.5 compatibility is still being confirmed. See Installation for more details.

Basic OGCE 2 2.0 Installation FAQ

  1. How do I install OGCE's release 2? See Installation on the left side navigation bar.
  2. Can I download this web site? This is currently being packaged with Maven's xdoc plugin.
  3. I have problems the installation. What do I do? Common problems are discussed in the Getting Started section. If you can't find an answer here, run (from a clean untarring of the software) 
    
[shell-promt> ./install.sh > install.log 2>&1
    Then mail the install.log to discuss@ogce.org.

Basic OGCE 2 1.0 Installation FAQ

  1. How do I install OGCE's release 2? The OGCE documentation is available from http://www.collab-ogce.org/nmi/ogce2-docs.
  2. Can I download the documentation? Yes, it is included in the OGCE 2 download.
  3. Are there screen shots of the OGCE portal? Yes, these are included in the documentation link above. Screenshots of uPortal and GridSphere are shown.

Problems with Grid Portlets

Review the Getting Starting section for common problems, including

  1. Getting a proxy;
  2. Problems running interactive GRAM jobs;
  3. Problems downloading files with GridFTP; and
  4. Errors in the GPIR browser.

MyProxy FAQ

  1. Where can I get more information on MyProxy? See the MyProxy Online Credential Repository web site. This has all the information you need to set up a MyProxy server. MyProxy is also included in the NMI GRIDS Center releases.
  2. How do I use MyProxy with the MyProxy portlet? You must first store your credentials in the MyProxy server. This will place a credential in the repository with a default lifetime of 7 days. Then fill out the form so that the portlet points to your MyProxy server and enter your username and password.
  3. How do I put a credential in myproxy for storage? You must use Java CoG command line tools for this. There is currently a bug that causes the portal to incorrectly retreive proxy certs stored initially with myproxy command line tools. The following is a quick guide to storing your credetials with the Java CoG:
    1. Download the Java CoG 1.1 from http://www-unix.globus.org/cog/java/1.1/.
    2. Set COG_INSTALL_HOME=$HOME/cog-1.1 or similar.
    3. cd COG_INSTALL_HOME/bin
    4. Run ./setup
    5. Run ./myproxy -h your.myproxy.server.name put
    This will store your credentials. This requires that you have a public/private keypair on the computer running the CoG.
  4. I want to configure the portal to use my own MyProxy server so that users have credentials at login. What do I do? First, when building your portal, edit the myproxy.server property in chef-1.0.7/build.properties so that its value is the DNS name of your MyProxy server. Users should store credentials in this server. Then, when users create accounts,they should use the same user name and passphrase for their portal accounts as they used with the MyProxy server.
  5. No proxies are being loaded. What's wrong? There are several possiblities.
    1. Make sure you have obtained and correctly placed a host certificate for the MyProxy service. See here form more information on host certificates.
    2. Make sure you have installed all CA certificates correctly (see the FAQ above). For the portal, these should be in the .globus/certificates directory.
    3. Make sure the MyProxy server runs as root and not as a regular user.
    4. Edit the myproxy-server.config file to uncomment the lines 
      5.                 accepted_credentials "*"
                accepted_retrievers "*"
  6. I get mutual authentication errors when I try to retrieve my credentials This will happen if you have not set up your CA certificates correctly. You should do the following:
    1. Make sure your portal has the CA certificate and signing policy files for your service.
    2. Make sure you have placed your host certificate in the /etc/grid-security/certificates of the remote service.
    3. You can test your Globus services' certificate setup with Globus command line tools, but you should run these from a different host.
  7. The command-line myproxy client tools all work fine but the portal doesn't load my credentials. What is the problem? This may be observed if you test the myproxy client tools (myproxy-init and myproxy-info, for example) on the same host as the myproxy server. The command line tools will work on the host server even if you have incorrectly setup the host certificates , so this is not a good test of your set up. The Java CoG myproxy client is pickier about host certificates and CA certs, and will throw a mutual authentication error even when both the portal and myproxy server run on the same host.

GridPort/GPIR FAQ

  1. Why do the GPIR portlets point to dummy resources? These are intended to demonstrate what a working GPIR system looks like. You must configure the GPIR services with your own providers
  2. How do I set up GPIR for my own resources? GPIR one of the GridPort services. You can download and set up GridPort from http://www.gridport.net. See Docs/GridPort.html for more information on using GridPort with the portal.
  3. What version should I use? OGCE uses GridPort 4.0.

Grid Services (GridFTP,GRAM, etc)

  1. Which versions of Globus do you support? We primarily support NMI Grids Center versions of these services. The current version of OGCE will work with the Globus Toolkit 4 series. In general, OGCE grid portlet components work through the Java CoG kit. A compatibility matrix is available here: http://www-unix.globus.org/cog/java/production.php. For a list of portal tests with Grid services, see Docs/Tests.html.

Basic OGCE 1 Installation FAQ

This FAQ is intended to address problems frequently encountered while installing the portal. Most problems arise from incorrect build.properties values. If you encounter problems, please first read carefully the documents INSTALLATION.html and Customization.html. The first property of the build file, user.home.directory must always be edited, and the second property, nmi.home.directory, often needs to be edited, especially if installing under Cygwin.

  1. Can I use the NMI portal with another version of Tomcat? The Tomcat server.xml file must be edited to include a custom Tomcat realm, org.chefproject.realm.ChefRealm. See the file portal/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.18/conf/server.xml for examples.

  2. I tried running "ant deploy" but I get "Error: JAVA_HOME is not defined correctly." The environment variable JAVA_HOME must be set in order to use Apache Ant. See the Ant manual, http://ant.apache.org/manual/index.html, particularly "Installing Ant."

  3. When I type "ant deploy" I get "Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!" You must be in the portal/chef-1.0.7 directory to build the portal. Move into this directory.

  4. My build failed because the .globus/certificate directory cannot be created. If you have incorrectly set the user.home.directory property in build.properties, or if you have not changed it from the default value, you will see an error similar to the following:
    1. BUILD FAILED file:/export/home/username/portal/chef-1.0.7/build.xml:61: Directory /export/home/wrongname/.globus/certificates creation was not successful for an unknown reason
    2. This error can be fixed by using the correct value for user.home.directory in the build.properties file
  5. When running "ant deploy", I get the error, "Could not find file /export/home/username/portal/chef-1.0.7/src/certificates/cog.properties to copy." This can occur when you put the NMI portal download in a directory not directly below your home directory. You have to change the nmi.portal.directory property in build.properties file to have the correct path. If your nmi.home.directory does not fall under your user.home.directory , just give nmi.home.directory the full path to your installation location; i.e., instead of "nmi.home.directory=${user.home.directory}/portal", just just "nmi.home.directory=/path/to/your/new/dir/portal" in build.properties.
  6. When running "ant deploy" I get an error like the following: BUILD FAILED file:/.../portal/chef-1.0.7/build.xml:83: Warning: Could not find file /.../portal/chef-1.0.7/mysql-connector-java-2.0.14-bin.jar to copy. This means that a) you have not downloaded the mysql jdbc connector jar, b) you have not put it in the correct location, or c) you have not correctly specified the user home and nmi home properties in the build.properties file. See Preparing the Installation in the Installation Guide .
  7. The installation went fine, but how do I change the colors and logos? Read Customization.html in the portal/Docs directory. This is also available from http://www.ogce.org.
  8. I don't want all of those portlets on the user's display. How can I just show the portlets I want? The build.properties file includes a property called build.style that illustrates how to build specific themes for your portal. You may also customize the portal after login as described in Customization.html.