FAQ
You should always compile software on the compute nodes, never on the login nodes. You can get an interactive session on a compute node for this.
The login nodes do not have Infiniband or GPUs. Thus, software that needs these to be run on compute nodes only. Either have it run in a batch job or get an interactive session on a compute node.
As we use FreeIPA for our User Management, you cannot use chsh to change your default shell. Instead, you can use the ipa command:
kinit
ipa user-mod --shell=/bin/bash USERNAME
Then you need to log out and log back in for the change to take effect.
Do not log in to the same login node
Login details are cached on the login nodes. This means that after you changed your shell, it takes a few minutes until the change is visible on the login node you are currently logged in to.
In order to see the change immediately, make sure to log in to a different login node than the one you are currently logged in to.
This is especially important for Matlab users as they need to use containers in the current setup.
The problem is that container images are rebuilt quite often and pulling these large images from the web takes time. To mitigate this, you can pull the image you need into your homefolder once. For instance, for the Matlab container, you can do this:
apptainer pull ~/matlab.sif oras://ghcr.io/thht/obob-singularity-container/xfce_desktop_matlab:latest
This is going to download the container into your home folder as matlab.sif.
Now you can use the path to the local image when you start your interactive session or job:
/home/USERNAME/matlab.sif as the "Apptainer Image".