Network certificate

Note: This document is Deprecated and will be removed soon. Please referere this KB article KB0014746 : jcert, The JLab Scicomp User Certificate Tool .

Network Authentication
Auger (the batch system) and Jasmine (the mass storage manager) both require Jefferson Lab certificates for authentication. The certificate identifies the user to the Auger (Jasmine) server in a cryptographically secure manner without requiring the user to enter their password. This allows users to create scripts which submit jobs for them while still providing the security required to ensure that users can only submit jobs for themselves. Users generate their certificate by executing the following command:
    /site/bin/jcert -create
 A valid CUE user name and password is required to generate a certificate.  This tool will generate and submit a request to the Jefferson Lab certificate authority. On some machines it may take a minute or two to generate the initial security key. You will be prompted to enter your CUE password to authenticate with the server. Once the tool completes, you will have a new certificate stored in a hidden directory named .scicomp in your home directory. The permissions on this directory should remain as set by the tool to prevent unauthorized access to the scientific computing system.

Users submitting their jobs from the central systems or Level 1 desktop Linux systems should not have any problems. However, users that submit jobs from non-Level 1 desktop Linux systems will need to copy their certificate from their CUE home directory to their home directory on their Linux desktop. Without a certificate, Auger and Jasmine won't run.  The copy can be done with `scp' from your desktop as follows:
    scp -pr ifarm:.scicomp ~/.
This will copy the directory and its contents to your local home directory and preserve all the permissions on the directory and file.