6. Setting preferences

From the preferences dialog you can choose a number of global settings that will apply to all resources and project view elements. These preferences are stored in your project files.

User information

Your name appears in the dialogs associated with the projects, experiments, runs, and jobs you create.  If you save a project file and give it to a collaborator to merge, you will be listed as the creator of your project view elements, but your collaborator will not be able to change this field.  The organization and email address are also stored with your name, but currently Teuthis does not use them for anything.

User information

Figure 1.  User information settings.

Your workspace path is the default location for your Teuthis project files, configuration files, runtime parameter files, and job templates.

Project view settings

In this section of the preferences dialog you can choose the colors and fonts used to display the different project view elements.  Click on the different buttons to bring up color or font selection dialogs.

Project view settings
Figure 2.  Project view settings.

Interface behavior

In this section you can alter several settings that affect the way Teuthis behaves.

Interface behavior settings

Figure 3.  Interface behavior settings.

To require confirmation every time a resource or project view element is deleted, check the "Confirm object deletion" button.  Checking the "Show standard output" button causes Teuthis to bring up a window showing the output of every remote command that returns a nonzero exit code or fails authentication.  To enable verbose logging of certain events such as remote command invocations, check the "Verbose logging" button and enter the log file name.  The log file will be created in your workspace directory.

Tendril is a small Python helper script that handles some operations on remote machines such as MD5 checksumming and multiple path creation.  It speeds up some operations and makes others possible.  In particular, if you wish to be able to synchronize your local source copies with those on remote machines, rather than uploading the complete source every time you click "Upload source" in the experiment dialog, you should check this box.  Tendril will only work on remote machines with Python installed.

Finally, to automatically update the status of jobs not marked "Complete," check the automatic update button and enter the time interval you would like.  Note that the first time this runs it may cause some unexpected authentication requests to pop up if you have incomplete jobs.

Grid services

In this section of the preferences dialog you can set options to be used with GSI authentication methods.

Grid services settings

Figure 4.  Grid services settings.

Currently you have two options for management of your X.509 Grid certificates:  to store them on your local machine or to store them on a MyProxy server.  If you store them on your local machine (ie. "Use MyProxy" is not checked), you need to enter the directory in which Teuthis will look for certificates.  The default location, ${HOME}/.globus, is usually fine.  Into this directory you should place all of your certificate and private key files, giving them names like <blah>cert.pem and <blah>key.pem.  Each machine configured to use GSI authentication will require a certificate subject.  When authenticating you to this machine, Teuthis will first check to see if a valid proxy exists and has this subject.  If not, Teuthis will search through all of the certificate files in your X.509 certificate directory until it finds one with the desired subject; Teuthis will then ask you for its passphrase and attempt to obtain a proxy.  If no matching certificate is found or your passphrase is incorrect, an error message will appear and remote command execution will fail.

If you wish to use MyProxy with passphrase authentication, check the "Use MyProxy" button and fill in the server hostname and account fields.  The local certificate directory field will become inactive.  Before authenticating yourself to the Grid using MyProxy, you must use the myproxy-init command to store a credential on the MyProxy server (you must have the MyProxy client software installed to do this.)  You will be asked for both the credential's passphrase and a passphrase to protect the credential on the MyProxy server.  Once you have stored a credential, you can retrieve it at any time during its lifetime using the myproxy-logon command, providing the MyProxy passphrase you used to store the credential.  Teuthis will ask you for the passphrase and issue this command on your behalf if you have checked "Use MyProxy" and it does not find a valid proxy on your machine for the machine to which you are trying to authenticate.  For more information on MyProxy, please see the MyProxy documentation.

Note that if multiple machines are configured to use GSI authentication with the same certificate subject, authenticating yourself to the first one will allow access to the others, because in the process of authenticating yourself you will retrieve a proxy certificate that is valid on all of the machines requiring the same subject.

You may also set the proxy lifetime in hours.  Note that this is not the same as your certificate lifetime or the lifetime of your credential on the MyProxy server.

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