Online tutorial - some snags

[lohancock]

Discussed in #86

^{Originally posted by lohancock March 28, 2022}
Following the recent update to the containers, I tried out the tutorial from the beginning.

• One demur, I worked in a spot instance. Just after selection c5.4xlarge, in the Configure Instance Details page, under Purchasing Option, i chose Request Spot Instances. I do not think this mattered, did save some money.

• Second demur, I used Instance Connect instead of Putty. Easier. So for the Security Group, instead of MyIp I gave HTTP access to the Northern Virginia Instance Connect server, namely, 18.206.107.24/29..... And so I skipped instruction 4, setting up SSH access..... And instead of instruction 6, i just clicked the CONNECT button on the instances page with the new instance selected. Note that it advises I choose the name root and I do and everything works fine with that. (note that in a preliminary round I tried using the name ec2-user but then I had to sudo things)....... I don't think using Instance Connect mattered either....

Then began working through the tutorial but there are anomalies.....

Almost all commands can be cut and pasted and they run, but there are exceptions: the command export PROJ_DIR=pwd works if I type it in but not if I cut and paste. I think it is some character that looks right but is the wrong unicode. URL dialogue checks and fixes things like that but the command line is particular...

same for the download. It does not work via cut and paste but it does work if I type it all in.

Under the section on downloading data, the Sandy data download does not work but the others all do. error is: "curl (3) URL using bad/illegal format or missing URL

In every case, echo from the ls -ald command is different in details from what is set out to expect, such as presenting a different version number.

Everything else then works all the way to the cases. Once there, I skipped the Sandy because had just failed to download the data as noted above. Went onward to Snow.

Under setup environment, once again it is necessary to type in export PROJ_DIR=pwd rather than cut and paste. Then it works.

The command PROJ_VERSION=4.0.0 does not work but I have tried out instead PROJ_VERSION="4.0.0" and no complaints

Under Run NWP Initialization components I run the Singularity command

singularity exec -B ${PROJ_DIR}/data/shapefiles:/home/data/shapefiles -B ${PROJ_DIR}/container-dtc-nwp/components/scripts/common:/home/scripts/common -B ${PROJ_DIR}/container-dtc-nwp/components/scripts/snow_20160123:/home/scripts/case -B ${CASE_DIR}/pythonprd:/home/pythonprd ../python_${PROJ_VERSION}.sif /home/scripts/common/run_python_domain.ksh

but I get a fatal error:

FATAL: could not open image /home/ec2-user/python_4.0.0.sif: failed to retrieve path for /home/ec2-user/python_4.0.0.sif: lstat /home/ec2-user/python_4.0.0.sif: no such file or directory

then i stopped.