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Troubleshooting

Common SSH Issues

Here are some of the most common issues users face when using SSH.

Keys

The following clusters use SSH keys: Farm, Franklin, Hive, and HPC2.

If you connect to one of these and are asked for a password (as distinct from a passphrase for your key), your key is not being recognized. This is usually because of permissions or an unexpected filename. SSH expects your key to be one of a specific set of names. Unless you have specified something other than the default, this is probably going to be $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.

If you specified a different name when generating your key, you can specify it like this:

ssh -i $HOME/.ssh/newkey [USER]@[cluster].hpc.ucdavis.edu

If you kept the default value, your permissions should be set so that only you can read and write the key (-rw------- or 600). To ensure this is the case, you can do the following:

chown 600 $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa

On HPC2, your public key is kept in $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys. Please make sure to not remove your key from this file. Doing so will cause you will lose access.

Common Slurm Scheduler Issues

These are the most common issues with job scheduling using Slurm.

Using a non-default account

If you have access to more than one Slurm account and wish to use an account other than your default, use the -A or --account flag.

e.g. If your default account is in foogrp and you wish to use bargrp:

srun -A bargrp -t 1:00:00 --mem=20GB scriptname.sh

No default account

Newer slurm accounts have no default specified, and in this case you might get error message like:

sbatch: error: Batch job submission failed: Invalid account or account/partition combination specified

You will need to specify the account explicitly as explained above. You can find out how to view your Slurm account information in the resources section.