Running CernVM-FS client on Ubuntu

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Nick

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, this is a post about getting the client to run correctly. We’re trying to get the client to run using FUSE in order that people lacking root can mount the filesystem - this is likely to be important for getting it to run on our clusters. I’m not quite sure how plausible this it likely to be.

The most useful tool I found in getting this working was cvmfs_config chksetup, which gives a listing of any problems it finds with your configuration. For me, the problems were thus:

Autofs needs to be installed, which is isn’t by default in Ubuntu: la la la la
```
apt-get install autofs
```
Then, you need to add the cvmfs entry to /etc/auto.master:
```
/cvmfs /etc/auto.cvmfs
```
Add cvmfs to the group ‘fuse’:
```
gpasswd -a fuse cvmfs
```

Following the steps given by running cvmfs_config info <reponame> on the server, we also have:

Copy the public key across to /etc/cvmfs/keys/repo.name.pub on the client.
Modify /etc/cvmfs/default.local (or create it) to include:
```
CVMFS_REPOSITORIES=repo.name
```

Create /etc/cvmfs/config.d/repo.name to contain:

CVMFS_SERVER_URL=http://server.hostname.example.com/cvmfs/repo.name
CVMFS_PUBLIC_KEY=/etc/cvmfs/keys/repo.name.pub
CVMFS_HTTP_PROXY=DIRECT

Or using whatever proxy settings you need to.

This was enough to have autofs mounting the repositories specified under /cvmfs. To get fuse working properly, it seemed to help to add myself into the fuse group (although it seemed to work without this, only throwing a complaint on being unable to read /etc/fuse.conf).