User Accounts

To add, update and delete user accounts on the Monolithe there are 3 dedicated scripts presented in the following sections. These scripts are only available on the frontend (monolithe.soc.lip6.fr) and located in the /nfs/sbin folder. To execute them you need to be in the sudoers group (= having root privileges).

adduser-nfs

To add a new user on the Monolithe you need to call the adduser-nfs script. The latest will create an account on the frontend and on all the available nodes. The users creation on the nodes is performed thanks to Slurm (based on srun command).

For instance, if you want to add a new user named toto-nfs you can do:

sudo adduser-nfs toto-nfs

The previous command will ask you to enter en password.

If you prefer to directly enter a password you can also call adduser-nfs like this:

sudo adduser-nfs toto-nfs totopasswd

adduser-nfs will automatically create a home directory located here: /nfs/users.

Note

By convention on the frontend, logins are postfixed by -nfs. This clearly indicates that these accounts have a home directory on the NFS. Again, by convention, the UIDs are set to a value greater than 1200. It ensures that these UIDs are not already in use on the nodes.

deluser-nfs

To delete a user on the frontend and on the compute nodes, you can call the deluser-nfs script:

sudo deluser-nfs toto-nfs

This will erase the user from the system database but will keep the user home.

If you also need to delete the home directory you can do:

sudo deluser-nfs toto-nfs --delete-home

It will remove the user from the system database and it will delete the /nfs/users/toto-nfs folder.

upuser-nfs

When adding new nodes to the cluster, the user accounts are not automatically created on the new machines. If you want to propagate an user account on a new node that has been setup on the Slurm cluster you can do:

sudo upuser-nfs toto-nfs

This script also checks that the UIDs between the frontend and the compute nodes are the same. If not, the script will stop with a error telling you which UIDs differs from the master and on which Slurm partition.

Info

Most of the time you will want to add all the NFS users to the new node. For this, you can directly call the following command:

sudo upusers-nfs

This will call the previous upuser-nfs (user without "s") command on all the available logins automatically.

Tips

For each user, on each node, a space on the local drive is automatically created here: /scratch/toto-nfs. It is useful when a large amount of files is generated. In this particular case, the performance of the NFS is pretty bad and it is advised to use the scratch space.