SAFE for Individual Users

The Turing’s SAFE is an online user service management system. Through SAFE, individual users can request machine accounts, reset passwords, see available resources and track their usage. All users must be registered on SAFE before they can apply for accounts on the machines in the Turing’s Research Computing Service.

Registering, logging in, passwords

Register on SAFE

  1. Go to SAFE New User Signup Form
  2. Fill in your personal details. You can come back later and change them if you wish
  3. Click “Register”
  4. You are now registered. Your SAFE password will be emailed to the email address you provided. You can then login with that email address and password

At this point your account is registered on SAFE but you do not have a machine account on the Turing’s Research Computing Service.

To obtain a machine account on the Turing’s Research Computing Service you require a Project Code. Your project’s PI or Project Manager should be able to supply you with these details. Once you have them you should:

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Request an account for a Research Computing Service machine.

Login to SAFE

  1. Go to SAFE
  2. Type in the email address you have registered with.
  3. Type in your SAFE password.
  4. Click “Login”.
  5. You are now on the Main Page and here you can see menus along the top which give access to SAFE functionality.

Change your personal details on SAFE

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the menu Your details and select Update personal details
  3. Make the changes you wish
  4. Click Commit Update to save the changes
  5. Go back to Your details and you will see the revised information

Do not forget the last step, or nothing will happen.

Note: your postal address does not automatically include the name of your department and institution; if you want these in your postal address, you must type them again.

Change your email address on SAFE

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the menu Your details and select Update email
  3. Enter the new email address and click Request

A verification email will then be sent to the new email address. This email contains a link which you must use to verify your new address. On acknowledging your new address the change will be committed and you must use the new email address when logging into SAFE.

Change your SAFE password

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the menu Your details and select Change SAFE password
  3. Fill in the boxes and click Change

Reset your SAFE password

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Enter your email address
  3. Click Email
  4. The SAFE will mail your password to your email address.

SAFE will only mail to email addresses it already knows. But email is not a secure medium, so if you change your password this way, you should immediately change it again from inside SAFE.

Note: anyone could go to SAFE, type your email address and request a new password by clicking “Email”. If that happens you will receive an email message out of the blue saying that your password has been changed. In this case you should change your password again as soon as possible.

Request an account for a Research Computing Service machine

  1. Login to SAFE.

  2. Go to the menu Login accounts and select Request login account

  3. Choose the project code for the machine you want from the Project pull-down list.

  4. Then press Select Project. A new screen will appear.

  5. Press the radio button next to the machine you want the account for then press Select Machine.

  6. In the field next to Request username, enter the username you would prefer to use on this machine.

    Every username must be unique, and you must create a new machine account with a unique username for each project you work on. Usernames cannot be used on multiple projects, even if the previous project has finished.

  7. Accept the Terms and Conditions of Access by clicking the appropriate button.

When you do this, you will be sent an acknowledgment by email, which will include your SAFE password — you should change this as soon as possible.

You will have to wait for your PI or project manager to accept your request to register. When this has happened, the systems team are prompted to create your account on the machine. Once this has been done, you will be sent an email. You can then Get your password for the service machine from your SAFE account.

Get your password for the service machine

Wait till you receive the email with your details. Then:

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the menu Login accounts and you will see your account on the machine listed. Click username
  3. This will display details of your account. Click View Login Account Password You will need to enter in your SAFE password and then click view, and you will see your password to the machine

This password is generated randomly by SAFE. It’s best to copy-and-paste it across when you login to the machine.

Reset the password on your machine account

If you have forgotten your current password, or it has expired, then you can ask for it to be reset:

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the menu Login accounts and select the account you need the new password for
  3. Click username which displays details of this machine account.
  4. Click New Login Account Passwd

The systems team will change your password. When this has been done, you will be informed by email; this means that you can come back to SAFE and Get your password for the service machine.

Change a password on your machine account

This is machine-specific.

Note: When you change your password on machines in this way, the changes are not reflected on SAFE, so please remember your new password.

hydra-vpn.epcc.ed.ac.uk gateway:

  1. At the command-line, run:

    passwd

  2. You will be prompted to enter your old password.

  3. You will be prompted to enter your new password twice.

Alan Turing Institute Cray Urika-GX Service:

  1. At the command-line, run:

    change_ldap_passwd

  2. You will be prompted to enter your new password twice.

  3. You will be prompted to enter your old password.

Atiras portal:

  1. Go to the Atiras portal home page.
  2. Click the menu labelled by your username at the top-right of the page.
  3. Select ‘Settings’.
  4. Fill in the following fields:
    • ‘Current Password’
    • ‘New Password’
    • ‘Confirm New Password’
  5. Click ‘Update Password’.

Atiras Secure Safe Haven and build arena virtual machines:

If running a SSH (secure shell) session, or from terminal window in an RDP (remote desktop) session:

  1. Run:

    passwd

  2. You will be prompted to enter your old password.

  3. You will be prompted to enter your new password twice.

Alternatively, if running an RDP (remote desktop) session:

  1. Click the button icon on the top right hand side of the desktop.
  2. You will be presented with a dialog box. Click your user name then select ‘Account Settings’.
  3. Click ‘<your-virtual-machine-username>’ on the row of user names.
  4. Click the button (with five blobs) next to the ‘Password’ field.
  5. Fill in the following fields:
    • ‘Current Password’
    • ‘New Password’
    • ‘Verify New Password’
  6. Click ‘Change’.

User Mailing Options

View user mailings

All mailings are archived and can be viewed in SAFE.

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the section View user mailings.
  3. Press the View button to access the mailings.

Join, or leave, a mailing list

There are three mailing lists available.

  • Major Announcements mailings contain information on major service upgrades and future plans. All users are subscribed to this list by default.
  • Service News mailings contain information on training courses, newsletters, events, and other general announcements. All users are subscribed to this list by default.
  • System Status Notifications inform users when the service goes up or down, including the reminders of the next planned maintenance shutdowns. Users are not subscribed to this list by default. You will need to explicitly subscribe to this list if you wish to receive these emails.

You can subscribe to any combination of these email lists via SAFE:

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the menu Your details click Email list settings
  3. In the panel headed Mailing list preferences click on the mailing lists you would like to subscribe to.
  4. Click Update List Preferences

If you wish to unsubscribe from user mailings completely:

  1. Click on the menu Your details click Update personal details find Opt out of user emails field and click it.
  2. Click Commit Update. Do not forget this step, or nothing will happen.

Note: This overrides any option enabled in Mailing list preferences panel.

Note: Regardless of whether you are subscribed to a particular mailing list, you can still view all user mailings which have been sent, from within SAFE. See View user mailings for details.

Tracking and Managing Available Resources

Check how much time and space are available to you

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the menu Login accounts.
  3. Select the username which you wish to see details for.

You will then see the information for this account. You will see the quotas for disk space (if your project group is using these) and how much is in use.

You can also see which file systems your project is using. Under the heading Volume you will see entries for RDF (if used by your project), home and work and in brackets after each, the name of the file system they are hosted on, followed by the current usage by your project, and total quota.

The budget values displayed are updated every morning, and the values shown for disk use are updated four times a day. For this reason, all these values may not be completely up-to-date. If there is a lot of activity in your project, the numbers shown could be significantly different from from the current ones.

Request more kAUs/disk space

In the first instance, please contact the principal investigator, or the project manager of your project. The PI will then take the necessary steps to either allocate you more resources out of the project reserve, or to request an increase from the helpdesk/research councils.

The helpdesk does not own project resources and has no authority to allocate them to individual users. This responsibility lies with the project PI/project manager.

Review the use you have made of the service, or the activity of the service as a whole

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the menu Service information and select Report Generator.
  3. Select the report you wish to run and the format you want the output in (web, PDF, CSV, XML) by clicking the appropriate icon in the list.
  4. Complete the required information in the form: this will usually consist of at least a date range to analyse and may have other options depending on the report you are running.
  5. Click Generate Report.

If you are a PI or Project Manager, you will have access to additional reports to generate information on whole projects or groups as well as your own usage and the usage of the service as a whole.

Miscellaneous

Check the queries you have submitted to the helpdesk

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the menu Help and Support and select Your support requests.
  3. Click the number of a query to check the contents of the query log.

This will show you the queries of yours that haven’t yet been resolved.

Note: some of the internal correspondence about a query will not be shown.

You can also use SAFE to submit a query — use New support request.

Register your approval — or your annoyance

  1. Login to SAFE.
  2. Go to the menu Help and Support and select Service feedback.
  3. Click on the scale somewhere between 5 penalty points and 5 gold stars indicating your level of anger or delight.
  4. Optionally: enter a comment in the comment box.
  5. Click Set Token.

The tokens may appear in the public service reports, although your name will not be published with them. Although an entry in the comment field is optional, it necessarily gives greater weight to your feelings - without it we cannot tell why you have set a token.