Configure Omni

Omni is a tool that will help you reserve resources in GENI, using your GENI credentials. The first step is to load into Omni your information. Omni uses a configuration file, and there is a script that will automatically generate the file with some default options and place it in the default place of `~/.gcf/`. Follow these steps: In the GENI Portal, go to the `Profile` Tab. Scroll all the way to the end of the page, to the section titled ''Configure omni'' Click on the ''customized configuration data'' link In the next page, make sure you choose as your project ''NSDI13'' and click the ''Download omni bundle'' button, and select to save it. Open a terminal window

Run:

• omni-configure.py -f portal

The output should look like:

geni@GEC16-Tutorials:~$ omni-configure.py -f portal
{'portal_bundle': '~/Downloads/omni-bundle.zip', 'verbose': False, 'cert': '~/.ssl/geni_cert', 'framework': 'portal', '
configfile': '~/.gcf/omni_config', 'plkey': '~/.ssh/geni_pl_key', 'prkey': '~/.ssh/geni_key', 'pick_project': False}
INFO:omniconfig:Using configfile: /home/geni/.gcf/omni_config
INFO:omniconfig:Using portal bundle /home/geni/Downloads/omni-bundle.zip
INFO:omniconfig:Private key stored at: /home/geni/.ssh/geni_key
INFO:omniconfig:Wrote omni configuration file at: /home/geni/.gcf/omni_config
geni@GEC16-Tutorials:~$ omni-configure.py -f portal

Look around the omni_config file

Open the file ~/.gcf/omni_config using either vim or emacs. Close to the top of the file you will see two parameters called default_cf and users. Your username should be at least listed in the user section. Look for the sections in the file that are named [pg] and [<username>].

In the [<username>] section, the information need for logging-in to reserved compute resources are provided. It includes your unique user URN and a public key that would be uploaded to the hosts that you reserve.

In the [pg] section you configure Omni to use your personal information. The cert and the key attribute point to files that we have manually downloaded from pgeni.gpolab.bbn.com. This is equivalent to the Download action of Flack.

Another interesting section to look at is the [aggregate-nicknames] sections. Flack already knows the URL for all the AMs and present you a list of AMs to choose from using a short, descriptive name. In Omni a user is required to pass the URL for each call to the GENI AM API. In this section the user gets a chance to provide short descriptive names to the URLs that are easier to memorize and use.

Test Omni setup

In order to test that our configuration is correct, you can issue a getversion command. For this step we have used ProtoGENI's AM, but you can use any Aggregate Manager(AM).

1. In the terminal type:

   omni.py getversion -a pg-utah
   

   In GENI each AM can be contacted using a specific URL. In order to make it easier to talk to AMs, Omni uses nicknames; i.e. it maps each URL into an easy to remember nickname. For example the ProtoGENI AM listens for requests at https://pgeni.gpolab.bbn.com:12369/protogeni/xmlrpc/am/2.0, however you can use the nickname pg-utah to refer to that URL. Nicknames are defined in each user's omni_config file.

For the rest of the tutorial we are going to use aggregate nicknames.