Funny Curly things

Introduction

The curl tool is sometimes very handy to query grid services. For example, you can use 'curl' to query the status of grid jobs, and in theory you could even submit a grid job using 'curl'.

Starting with Fedora 12, RedHat has decided to change the way 'curl' is built by default. As Fedora 12 is the 'baseline' for RedHat Enterprise Linux 6, this also affects the 'curl' command in RHEL6, CentOS6 and Scientific Linux 6. In the past, 'curl' was built and linked using the OpenSSL libraries. With Fedora 12+/RHEL6+, 'curl' is now built and linked using the NSS library. This has an impact on you can use 'curl' to query different grid services.

The problem does not apply to grid services only, every site that requires a client-side certificate chain, that is, the client needs to present both a certificate and an intermediary key, is affected.

VOMS Role

The HEP VOs have an SGM role, usually of the form

 /Role=lcgadmin

However, in this HOWTO the VO vlemed was chosen as the example. This VO has a role

/Role=sgm

available, which gives users who possess that role the right to install software in the VO specific software area. To generate an SGM-proxy use

$ voms-proxy-init --voms vlemed:/vlemed/Role=sgm