OGCE FAQs

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 release is based on the JSR 168 portlet standard. The current release focuses on Grid portlets with The OGCE 1 release is based on Jetspeed 1.4 and CHEF 1.0
3. Why is the OGCE 1 download so large? The portal download includes everything (almost) that you need to run the portal, including a Jakarta Tomcat 4.1.18 webserver, a patched version of Jakarta Jetspeed, and several third party jar files, as well as all of the NMI software. Because of copyright concerns, we do not currently include the required MySQL JDBC driver in the download. See Docs/INSTALL.html for the URL..
4. What operating systems, Java versions, and grid services can I use with the portal? See Docs/Tests.html for a list.

Basic OGCE 2 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.

Basic OGCE 1 Installation FAQ

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.

MyProxy FAQ: OGCE 1 and 2

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. You should use the Java CoG command tools for inserting your credentiasl. The MyProxy portlet does not correctly retreive credentials placed in the repository with current (myproxy-6.1) versions of the myproxy-init command-line client tools
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

                      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 TACC resoruces? These are intended to demonstrate what a working GPIR system looks like.
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. GridPort is also included in the NMI GRIDS Center Release 5.
3. What version should I use? OGCE uses GridPort 3.0.
4. What is CSF? CSF is the Community Scheduler Framework,an open source extension to Globus available from from Platform Computing. See http://www.platform.com/products/Globus/ for a download.

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 Release 5. 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.
2. The MyProxy Portlet works but I get the following error from GridFTP:

   Authentication failed [Root error message: Failure unspecified at 
   GSS-API level [Root error message: null]]
   org.globus.common.ChainedIOException: Authentication failed 
   [Root error message: Failure unspecified at GSS-API level 
   [Root error message: null]].
   

   You will observe this if you try to execute Grid services with a credential from MyProxy that is stored with myproxy command line clients. You should instead use the Java CoG command line clients for initially storing your credential. We are working to resolve this bug.

XML Newsgroups

1. How do I set up my own XML newsgroup system? The XML Newsgroup services run independently of the portal and can be downloaded from http://www.xmlnuggets.org. For this and other service downloads, see the "Downloads" link of the OGCE website.

OGRE

1. What is OGRE? OGRE is the Open GCE Runtime Engine. For more information, click here. This and other downloads are also available from the "Download" section of OGCE website.
2. How do I set up my own OGRE job manager? To get a copy of OGRE, click here. For this and other service downloads, see the "Download" section of the OGCE website.