wiki:GENI-in-a-Box/GiB-tips

Version 4 (modified by lnevers@bbn.com, 12 years ago) (diff)

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GENI-in-a-Box Tips

This page provides tips and hints that may be useful in managing your GENI-in-a-Box.

1 Creating additional user accounts

GENI-in-a-Box creates an account for user 'gibuser' (your username on GENI-in-a-Box) on the virtual machines created for your slice. You can add additional accounts on these virtual machines; the following steps show how you can add an account for user 'chris':

  1. Create a public-private key-pair for Chris using the command ssh-keygen -t rsa. The public key created (chris.pub) must be moved to the directory ~/.gcf and the private key to ~/.ssh. In the example below we used an empty passphrase i.e. hit <return> on the prompt for a passphrase.
    $ ssh-keygen -t rsa
    Generating public/private rsa key pair.
    Enter file in which to save the key (/home/gibuser/.ssh/id_rsa): chris
    Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
    Enter same passphrase again: 
    Your identification has been saved in chris.
    Your public key has been saved in chris.pub.
    The key fingerprint is:
    26:1a:48:91:bb:94:82:b3:83:ea:4e:e2:f7:95:00:08 gibuser@GiB
    The key's randomart image is:
    +--[ RSA 2048]----+
    |E ..             |
    |. o.             |
    |...+             |
    |+.+..            |
    |.=..... S        |
    |+ .  o.o.        |
    |oo  .  o         |
    |=  .  .          |
    |o+. ..           |
    +-----------------+
    $ mv chris.pub ~/.gcf
    $ mv chris ~/.ssh
    $
    
  1. Make the following changes to the file ~/.gcf/omni_config:
    1. Look for the string users = in the file ~/.gcf/omni_config and add Chris to the list of users:
      users = Gibuser, Chris
      
    2. Look for the section # Define users here and add the following lines to that section:
      [Chris]
      urn=urn:publicid:IDN+geni.net:gpo:gcf+user+chris
      keys=~/.gcf/chris.pub
      

2. Copying files to/from GENI-in-a-Box and your computer

GENI-in-a-Box Ubuntu flavor: You can use VirtualBox shared folders to copy files to/from GENI-in-a-Box. See http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#sharedfolders for instructions.

GENI-in-a-Box Fedora flavor: At this time VirtualBox shared folders do not work with GENI-in-a-Box. If you are running on Mac OS or Linux, you can scp from Geni-in-a-Box to your computer to copy files to and from GENI-in-a-Box and your computer. If you are on Windows you will need to install and run the ssh daemon on your computer before you can use scp to it from GENI-in-a-Box.

3. Suspending and resuming your GENI-in-a-Box session

You can suspend your GENI-in-a-Box session by hibernating your GENI-in-a-Box virtual machine. This will save the state of the virtual machine on disk and will allow you to resume your work the next time you start up VirtualBox.

  • To hibernate a virtual machine running Fedora, click on the logged-in user's name on the top right of the GENI-in-a-Box screen and select shutdown from the drop-down menu. You will now be presented with a number of shutdown options including hibernate. Click on hibernate.
  • To hibernate a virtual machine running Ubuntu, click on the power button icon on the top of the GENI-in-a-Box screen and select hibernate from the drop-down menu.

Virtual machines that have been hibernated show up as Powered Off in the Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager window. To restart the virtual machine, select it in the VirtualBox Manager window and click the green arrow labeled Start.

4 Special files installed on each node in a slice

The GENI-in-a-Box aggregate follows the ProtoGENI model of installing on each node in the slice files with information that might be useful to the experimenter. Specifically:

  • The manifest rspec is available in all the experimenter nodes at /prof/geni-in-a-box.net/exp/<slicename>/tbdata/geni_manifest.
  • The fully qualified name of the node is available in /var/emulab/boot/nickname. An example of a fully qualified node name is pc101.myslice.geni-in-a-box.net where myslice is the name of the slice.