Set up your account

Before using the CERN cloud, you must be subscribed to the cloud service. See Subscribe for more details.

Configure your shell profile

When you log in to lxplus8 or aiadm, the environment is automatically configured for you to be able to access your personal project resources using the openstack command

In case you want to use the component specific clients download the 'OpenStack RC File V3' from this location and source it as above (it will ask you for your CERN password). Make sure you select the project you want to use before downloading the file. Afterwards, source the downloaded file:

$ source .openrc

Note: to change to a different project on aiadm, you can use the ai-rc command:

$ eval $(ai-rc "Other project name")

Create your OpenStack keypair

On lxplus8 and aiadm, you will have an ssh key pair in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. If you do not have one, run ssh-keygen -t rsa to generate one. This will be used to ssh into the VMs once they are created.

Warning

Even if you already have an existing key like ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub, we recommend creating an RSA one to be compatible with recent systems. Distributions like RedHat have deprecated DSA starting with their 8 release. This means that those keys will be invalid to access the systems via SSH.

If you need RSA keys for legacy systems, you can create multiple keypairs and pick the right one depending on the virtual machine created.

Now that you have created your keypair in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, you can upload it to OpenStack as follows

$ openstack keypair create --public-key ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub lxplus
+-------------+-------------------------------------------------+
| Field       | Value                                           |
+-------------+-------------------------------------------------+
| fingerprint | 5c:c1:af:06:03:e8:db:68:bb:d6:6a:73:75:82:2a:81 |
| name        | lxplus                                          |
| user_id     | my-user-name                                    |
+-------------+-------------------------------------------------+