Guest Accounts

All guests at the IRTF are required to establish their own personal accounts for use while they are observing. All instruments should be run from these accounts. These accounts are good for a time period starting three days prior to their observing run and ending three days after their run. Individuals who have split runs over the span of a month, or a couple of months, can request the IRTF System Administrator to keep their account alive over this time span. Individuals who would like to share accounts over a set of runs on the same instrument should also contact the IRTF System Administrator about keeping their account alive.

For remote observing, you create your guest in the same manner, logging in using ssh:

ssh duke.ifa.hawaii.edu -l addguest

The rest of the procedure is the same. Please contact your support astronomer or the system administrator to get the addguest password.

Guest accounts are acquired in the following manner:

1. Login as "addguest" to any IRTF machine at Hale Pohaku, the Hilo remote room, or at the observatory. A script will run allowing you to establish a user account. Please as the IRTF support staff for the "addguest" password. At HP, the password may be taped on the machines. Depending on the type of workstation (Solaris or Linux), their are 2 methods for loging in as "addguest"
   1. For Sun Solaris Workstations:
      Select "Command Line Login" from the menu under the "Options" button. Hit return to get the login prompt. Enter "addguest".

   2. For Linux CentOS Workstations:
      Select "Failsafe_Terminal" from the "Sessions" menu. Enter "addguest" in the Username field and hit return, then the password. A dialog box with the message, "This is a Fail Safe terminal session..." may appear, hit "ok" to continue.

2. After loggin in, you will then be asked for your name and program number. Provide the name you would like to be identified by, and the program number (eg. 78) assigned to you by the IRTF when you were allocated time.

3. If you are within the time period when you may create an account, you will be assigned an account name between guest00 and guest19. You will be asked for a password. Provide the password you would like to use for your guest account. You will need to enter this password two (2) times.

4. An account will be created for you, complete with all the bells and whistles necessary to run any of the software you will need. Any small files you need can be placed in this account, and you can send and receive mail. Large files, and all data, should be placed on one of the scratch disks. See disk_space for more information.

5. You will be placed back at the login prompt. Simply log in using your new account and password. Please note, NIS may take serveral minutes to distribute your new password, so your account may not work for at most about 15 minutes after creating it. (see the FAQ below).

   After trying to login, if you see a "no shell" error, or recieve a message saying that the account is not active, wait 10 minutes and try again.

Guest Accounts FAQ:

1. Why can't I login immediately after creating the guest account? If I change my password, why does it take so long before the unix system accepts the new password?

Solaris has something called NIS which is used to handle account information (ie: passwords). The Guest Account System modifies these NIS tables when activating guest accounts. However, these changes are not always immediately applied to the NIS tables. Sometimes there is a small delay (few minutes) before these table are updated.

After creating a guest account, you can't always login immediately after. Depending on when the NIS information is propagated, it could take up to 10 minutes or so before your account is active.