12. Getting help

Tip

Perhaps you are puzzled with something and seek for help on Spider. In this page you will find:

our Helpdesk details
how to get expert advice for project challenges
the most commonly asked questions and workarounds for known issues
some tutorial as prerequisites to use the platform

12.1. Helpdesk

If you run into problems and cannot find an answer in our Spider User Guide or the FAQ, we encourage you to contact our experts who are there to support the Spider users. Send us an email with your question at: helpdesk@surfsara.nl

Find more about SURFsara support availability and response times here.

12.2. Expertise

Our support team is specialized in advising on data processing strategies and collaborative data analysis. Over the years the team has gained experience in many unique projects, all requiring a unique combination of generic components to implement their ideal data processing setup. Our team is available to support a range of proven solutions for each problem:

off-the-shelf data staging processes from a variety of (external) storage systems
off-the-shelf processing orchestration processes
specialized consultancy for automated production pipes

12.3. FAQ

12.3.1. I cannot login after adding/changing my ssh keys

If you added or changed your SSH key on the SURFsara portal, access to the login node may not be immediately possible. It can take up to 15 minutes to be able to login to Spider. In case that it takes longer time, please contact us at helpdesk.

12.3.2. The FACL permissions on my file do not match the folder the files are stored in

This type permissions mismatch can occur when mv is used, as the move command keeps the original ACL entries from the original file. This behaviour is part of mv and can not be changed. The permission mismatch occurs when a file with no extra ACL entries is moved to a folder that has some non-trivial ACL entries set up. Using the cp command will allow the user to preserve the original ACL entries or accept the ACL entries from the destination folder to be enforced onto the copied files. This will ensure that no such permission mismatch occurs. Similarly, the rsync command will also allow the user to control what kind of ACL is applied to the files in the destination.

12.3.3. My apptainer container is failing to build on a worker node

This is a known bug triggered when a user is allowed to use --fakeroot and uses fakeroot in a Slurm job to build the container. The error you expect in this case is the container is allowed to write in /tmp during building. To avoid this issue, build the container on the UI machines instead.

12.4. Tutorials

Tutorial for Introduction to Unix
Tutorial for Introduction to batch scheduling systems
Tutorial for Slurm Quickstart