Case Study: Grappa

In this chapter, we discuss how to setup a demo of Grappa (Grid Application Portal for Physics Applications). This will install a Jetspeed portal and install the xbook athena (a small write-up of the athena notebook will be displayed once the portal is installed). Note: the athena xbook is stored in the CVS repository at codes/applications/xbooks/athena.

1. Login into a machine and create a directory called grappa-demo.

2. Untar/Unzip pacman into directory. E.g.,

      tar zxvf /u/ewww/xportlets/pacman/packages/pacman-2.066.tar.gz
   

   Optionally, you can download pacman from

      http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/xportlets/pacman/packages/pacman-2.066.tar.gz
   

3. Change to the pacman-2.066 directory.

4. Source the appropriate setup.[csh,sh] file.

5. Change back up to the grappa-demo directory.

6. Type

      pacman -get pacman
   

   and answer y to the question asking to start a new installation

7. Edit the caches file and replace

      http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/xportlets/pacman/cache
   

   with

      http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/xportlets/pacman/grappa-cache
   

8. Type

      pacman -get grappa-demo
   

   This step will install a lot of packages into this directory and may take a while depending on your machine and network connection.

9. Source the appropriate setup.[csh,sh] file.

10. Create a proxy credential by typing grid-proxy-init.

11. Type

        portal-start
    

12. Change to the xbooks-0.1-src directory.

13. Type

        nohup sh run.sh manager &
    

    This will start up the xbook manager on port 1111. Edit the run.sh script to change this or modify debugging output.

14. Get the URL printed out in step 11 and append jetspeed. E.g.

        https://linbox1.extreme.indiana.edu:8444/jetspeed
    

15. Log in to Jetspeed with username turbine and password turbine.

16. Click the xBooks link in the sidebar.

17. Type athena as the xbook and change the hostname and port accordingly.

The administrator username is admin and password is jetspeed. These are the defaults and can be changed by logging as the admin. The portal has been setup to not require administrator approval of account requests. This can be changed in the JetspeedResources.properties file. See the Jetspeed documentation [17] for more information.