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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, and Hive.

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:

chmod 600 $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa

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.