Troubleshooting¶

Connection to DESY website or windows drives doesn't work from max-display¶

max-display nodes are considered "outside" the DESY network. Connecting to DESY internal network is therefore not directly possible. That means

you can't directly ssh to non-Maxwell nodes
you can't connect to Windows machines or network drives
you can't access internal websites like registry.desy.de

For access via ssh or scp, use bastion.desy.de as a tunnel. For example

ssh -J bastion pal

will allow to login to pal, but you will need your DESY password and otp.

To enable access to internal website you will need to configure firefox to use bastion as a proxy host.

Firefox already running¶

when starting firefox an error message shows something like

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile.

This happens in particular on display nodes when running for example sessions in parallel, which will usually run on different display nodes. The nodes and firefox processes can easily be found:

# find the session
ls -l ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/lock
   ~.mozilla/firefox/profile/lock -> 131.169.193.133:+1751784

# determine the host
host 131.169.193.133
  133.193.169.131.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer max-display001.desy.de

# kill processes
ssh 131.169.193.133
killall firefox -u $USER

If firefox still complains, rm ~.mozilla/firefox/profile/lock (replace profile by '*' or the name of your profile)

Alternatively, use /software/tools/bin/kill-firefox.sh:

# list firefox processes
/software/tools/bin/kill-firefox.sh -l
   firefox seems to be running on max-display004
   firefox seems to be running on max-display001
   firefox seems to be running on max-display001

# killing processes requires password-less login. If you don't ssh-keys setup, or no valid kerberos ticket, just get one
kinit -f  # and provide your DESY password

# kill firefox processes
/software/tools/bin/kill-firefox.sh

Opening XFCE or other desktop environments fails¶

Gnome: ** (process:182218): WARNING **: Could not make bus activated clients aware of XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME environment variable: Could not connect: Connection refused

KDE: Could not start D-Bus. Can you call qdbus?

XFCE: Unable to contact settings server. Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-IsZBNH6nnH: Connection refused

If you see one of the error messages above it's most likely because you added conda to your environment. conda comes with its own, incompatible DBUS installation. As soon as you add conda to your PATH (for example by adding a module load conda to your .bashrc) none of the window managers will work.

Solution:

Don't add/remove the conda setup to/from your login environment OR
add auto_activate_base: false to ~/.condarc OR
run conda config --set auto_activate_base false once which will just add auto_activate_base: false to ~/.condarc