Setting up UPS on Linux box from scratch

This note is intended for system administrator who wants to install UPS on his new wonderful Linux box.

Fermilab Computing Division is famous for developing of the so called UPS product. It allows users to issue commands like:

 
$ setup cern 
$ setup geant 

It also gives system administrators a serious headache, because UPS is organized on different principals and is intended to solve different problems than packaging systems of major Linux distributions.

If you have AFS installed you can try to use UPS directly from Fermilab. You probably will end up setting up your local copy anyway, but it is good place to start, just to see that whole project is not completely hopeless. Assuming that you have bash :

kushnir@sphinx04:~$ . /afs/fnal.gov/ups/etc/setups.sh
kushnir@sphinx04:~$ setup cern
kushnir@sphinx04:~$ which paw
/afs/fnal.gov/ups/cern/2001/Linux+2.4/bin/paw

Following are steps to install your local UPS setup. They are based on steps described here There is a bunch of automated scripts - but they did not work for me, and I seriously dislike automated procedures.

• Only few steps have to be done by root The rest should be done by a member of appropriate group which is going to manage UPS products. Choose directory where you are going to setup UPS. It is likely to be NFS-mounted read-only on the rest of the computers of your cluster. For example /usr/ups . As root:

  
  mkdir /usr/ups
  chown root.staff /usr/ups
  chmod g+w /usr/ups
  

• Now work under products administrator account which can belong to group staff or any group you like (for example kushnir.staff ). Define some environment variables

  
    export UPS_DIR=/usr/ups/prd/ups/v4_7/Linux-2
    export PRODUCTS=/usr/ups/db
    export UPS_SHELL=sh
  

• Download and unpack UPS/UPD tar file

  
  cd /usr/ups
  wget ftp.fnal.gov:/products/bootstrap/tarfiles/Linux+2.tar.gz
  tar -xzvf Linux+2.tar.gz 
  rm Linux+2.tar.gz 
  chown -R kushnir.staff *
  chmod -R g+w *
  

• Adjust configuration files

  
       ${EDITOR} ${PRODUCTS}/.upsfiles/dbconfig
       ${EDITOR} ${PRODUCTS}/../etc/upsdb_list
  

  I recommend to define environment variable $UPS_ROOT_DIRECTORY in /etc/environment file and refer to this directory in UPS configuration files: dbconfig and upsdb_list .

  This way if you decided to move all ups tree in some other location you only need to modify /etc/environment .

• Declare current ups version. It will also move some important files in necessary places.

  
  ${UPS_DIR}/bin/ups declare -c -2 ups v4_7
  

• Adjust /etc/profile and /etc/csh.cshrc file and add there

  
  # Start UPS if available
  if [ -f $UPS_ROOT_DIRECTORY/etc/setups.sh ]; then
    . $UPS_ROOT_DIRECTORY/etc/setups.sh
  fi
  

  or

  # start UPS setup if it exists
  if ( -x $UPS_ROOT_DIRECTORY/etc/setups.csh ) then
    source $UPS_ROOT_DIRECTORY/etc/setups.csh
  endif