Automatic environment setup

Introduction

After the upgrade to Debian Lenny, we finally offer the psosiblity to automatically set-up your environment. This is being done via /etc/csh.cshrc for csh, tcsh users, /etc/profile for sh, ksh and bash users and /etc/zsh/zshrc for those using zsh.

The basic principles are the same for any shell. When you log into the cluster, it will try to set-up the environment in such a way that all necessary PATHs are set along with special variables. If you don't want to have all that or want to opt-out of a single feature group, please read on, as you can do so.

You can influence all this by creating special files in your home directory (usually it is sufficient to use touch file to create them and that will be all you need to do. One word of caution: If you set something now and forget about it, you might get unexpected results as some system installed package might be missing from your environment.

Available knobs to turn

file to touch	explanation
$HOME/.noautoprofile	Set this variable if you do NOT want to get anything set up by default. This is useful if you want to ensure that the admins will not tamper with your settings. However, please look into this before you report a problem
$HOME/.verboseautoprofile	Setting this variable will make the automatic environment setup more talkative, e.g. you will get notices telling you which settings were ignored by your request and which were done.
$HOME/.noautoprofile-<group>	This will disable the named group, i.e. this setting will not be applied.

Groups known to the system at the time of writing

group	explanation
condor	get all necessary stuff to access the Condor pool
dircolors	get nice colors when running ls - if your terminal permits it
ldg	get the LIGO Data Grid server environment set
ligotools.sh	enable the usage of LIGOtools
lscdatafindserver	set environment variables suitable to access out LDR server
lscsoft	source lscsoft-user.env and get all the software from lalsuite and friend. Beware, there are also opt-out methods for sub-packages here. For more information, please refer to the file /opt/lscsoft/lscsoft-user-env.sh or DASWG web pages.
matlab	get matlab into the path, please note, when using it remotely you need to use the -Y flag to ssh!
onlinehoft	set the veriables ONLINEHOFT and ONLINEDQ
readline	enable readline - better editing on the command line

We are sure in the future there will be more to come. If you spot any mistake/problem, please let us know through the usual channels!

-- CarstenAulbert - 08 Jul 2009