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Access to the IDIA Cloud
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This page provides details on how to obtain access to the virtual machines in the IDIA cloud system.

Requesting Access to the IDIA Virtual Machines

If you are already part of an IDIA project team, you can request access by filling out this form.

Please be sure to identify the project team that you are a part of. This is important, as it allows us to provide you with access to the relevant project files.

Your username, password and SSH public key will be added to LDAP (default username will be created from pre-@ part of email)

This will enable you to log into all IDIA machines that connect to LDAP, allowing you to log into VMs using ssh using their SSH key without needing to use your password.

Access

You can access IDIA machines via a Jupyter-Hub (preferred) or SSH (traditional).

The URL usually corresponds to the name of the VM, and is served on the IDIA domain. For example, our helo node can be accessed via https://helo.idia.ac.za.

Jupyter-Hub

A Virtual Machine (VM) can be accessed online using your browser (Chrome/Firefox preferred). Simply type in the URL provided.

You will be presented with a login window for the Jupyter-Hub. Use your previously generated (LDAP) username and password to access your account.

SSH

To SSH into an IDIA VM, you will need your SSH key.

This is how you would SSH into helo with X-forwarding:

$ ssh  -XY -i /path/to/your/key.pem helo.idia.ac.za -l <username>

Changing your Password

You need to change your generic password as soon as possible. You can do this with the following command (one line on the prompt):

$ ldappasswd -H ldap://10.102.4.109 -x -D "cn=username,ou=users,dc=idia,dc=arc,dc=ac,dc=za" -W -S -A

Important: In the command above, you will need to change username to your username.

You will then be prompted for passwords as follows:

  • Twice for your current password (verification).
  • Twice for your new password.
  • Once for your LDAP password, which will be your old password. This is required to bind to the LDAP server to commit the change to your password.

This is a little more involved then usual, because your credentials are not specific to a machine. Access on the cloud is coordinated on using the LDAP server -- this is why you need to do the authenticate -> enter new password -> authorize/bind process to propagate your password to the server. This allows us to provide you with access to any machine provisioned for your project without having to remember a myriad of passwords.

Incidentally, you can do this without ssh'ing into the machine -- simply open up a terminal using the Jupyter-Hub and use this to change your password.

Storage

All virtual machines will have the IDIA storage attached. You will have access to your work and your data on any system that you're logged into. Access to data is managed with Unix groups.

There are several storage areas available.

  • /users/<username>/, where /users is a shared BeeGFS volume.
  • /data/users/<username>/, where /data is a shared BeeGFS volume. This is the preferred space for you to store your longish term data products.
  • /data/<Project> is a shared directory on BeeGFS for a project. You can fetch raw data from here. Please steer away from dumping data into this directory.
  • /scratch/users/<username>/ is the shared working directory for , where /scratch is a BeeGFS volume). This is the preferred space for intermediate data products, e.g., you can use this space to do imaging.

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