The Account Request Page is the place to go to get an account on the PAMS Beowulf Cluster. By accessing this page you make known to the PAMS system administrators that you are asking for an account. If certain qualifications are met you will be granted a provisional account within the next hour. (The scripts run every hour.) At which time you and the PAMS system administrators will be notified by a call being placed in Remedy. The system administrators can then approve or deny the account. As of this writing, the only difference between a provisional account and a approved account is a substantial increase in quota.
There are several restrictions on the use of this cluster. This cluster was purchased with PAMS ETF money and therefore must be for student use. The Account Request Page will automatically grant an account to a graduate or undergraduate in a PAMS major. Faculty and staff can use the cluster but must first arrange an agreement with Pete Evans in PAMS Computing Operations.
The Account Request Page is a web form implemented in PHP. WRAP is used for authentication. Your user ID is then passed to the PHP script via an environment variable. Three checks are don against the user ID. The first attempts to find the user ID in a list of all PAMS majors which is contained in AFS. The second checks to see if the user has already been added to the system. The third checks to see if the user's ID is less than 65,535. This is due to the version of the Linux kernel and glibc in the Scyld Beowulf software not supporting user IDs that are greater than 65,535. If all these checks succeed, the user ID is added to the "access_list" table in the database, the user's preferred email is added to the "email" table, and the user's supplied reason is added to the "reason" table. Otherwise, account activation fails and the user is given a message describing the problem and an email address of the PAM system administrators.
Currently, I am not aware of any bugs or feature enhancements that need to go into this particular part of the Beowulf management scripts.
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