Access UK NGS

UK NGS provides national wide grid service. The following is what I have done in order to access NGS facilities.

1. Apply for a UK e-Science certificate.
2. Apply for an NGS account.
3. Install Globus Toolkit 4.2.1. export $GLOBUS_LOCATION=/usr/local/globus-4.2.1; configure --prefix=$GLOBUS_LOCATION; make; make install Because my linux box is running RHEL5, I chose to install from source to make use of openssl 0.9.8. Before I installed GT, I also installed a perl-XML-parser which had been missing. The compilation of GT from source took a couple of hours. So be patient.
   
4. Install my UK e-Science certificate: see the section below the heading "Installing your e-Science Certificate and Private Key".
5. Install UK e-Science CA certificate and signing policy. On the NGS CA certificate page, download CA certificate files 367b75c3.0 and 98ef0ee5.0, and signing policy files 367b75c3.signing_policy and 98ef0ee5.signing_policy. Save them into $HOME/.globus/certificates.
6. Set up running environment. source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh
   
7. Create a proxy certificate. grid-proxy-init -verify -debug This should not display any error message. To display the current proxy certificate: grid-proxy-info. To destroy the current proxy certificate: grid-proxy-destroy
8. Use gsissh to connect to NGS nodes. gsissh -p 2222 ngs.rl.ac.uk It uses the proxy certificate, so does not prompt for username and password.
9. Upload the proxy certificate to the MyProxy server. myproxy-init -s myproxy.grid-support.ac.uk -l wjfang Use "-l" to specify a unique username used in the myproxy server. During the execution, you will be prompted to enter a MyProxy pass phrase. Together with the username, the pass phrase allows to access the proxy certificate stored in the MyProxy server.
10. Now I can log into NGS Application Repository even on a different machine using my MyProxy username and pass phrase.