Why can't I log in?

Too many failed attempts to log into the web interface will result in your account being locked. You will get a message saying that your account has been frozen if you trigger it. If you are a student, please contact your TA. Otherwise, please contact us.

You must use your actual account name, not an email address, to log into users.isi.deterlab.net . Also, too many failed attempts to log into users.isi.deterlab.net will result in an IP address ban. We automatically whitelist all IP addresses that have successfully logged into the ​web interface and this list is synchronized every 15 minutes. So if you find yourself banned from connecting to users.isi.deterlab.net please log into the ​web interface and then wait.

How do I copy files from my workstation to a node in an experiment?

Your home directory from users is available on the nodes in your experiment. Copy your files to users.isi.deterlab.net using scp or sftp to make them available on your nodes.

How can I copy files from a node in the testbed to my workstation?

The reverse of the previous question: copy the files you want to your home directory, then download them from users.isi.deterlab.net using scp or sftp.

How can I install software on my nodes?

The currently supported operating system images (see the ​Recommended list for currently supported images) images have access to full package repositories on a local mirror. Depending on your OS you can use yum , apt-get , or pkg_add to install software that's been pre-packaged for each OS.

If there is no package for the software you wish to install, you can install from source. Copy the source tarball to the testbed (see How do I copy files from my workstation to a node in an experiment? or use wget or curl on users ), then follow the package's installation instructions.

While we will do everything we can to assist any issues you face, we do not have the resources to help individual users install software.

How do I connect the web browser on my workstation to the inner boss within an Emulab-in-Emulab experiment?

See ElabElabSshProxy

When I try to attach to an experiment with SEER, I get the error: Error downloading /proj/ProjectName/exp/ExperimentName/tbdata/node.pem: 2: no such file.

Make sure you've followed the instructions ​How to set up an experiment with SEER.

This error is most frequently seen because you have not included a node named control which is not connected to anything else in the topology.

Also make sure you've set the start command to run on every node, including control .

I try to swap in and get the error: Admission Control: $project/$experiment has too many nodes allocated!

If you are a class user: the maximum number of nodes that a class can allocated is limited (see ClassResourceLimits for details). Wait for some of your classmates to free up resources before trying to swap in again.

You are less likely to encounter this during non-peak hours (late night and early morning) and when deadlines are distant.

If you are not a class user: please file a ticket because something is broken.

I try to swap out and get the error: /usr/testbed/bin/nfree: Please cleanup the previous errors.

This may not be so frequent an error, but can arise when the experiment deliberately brings an interface down without bringing it back up prior to swap out. Try scheduling the link back up before the end of experiment.

Your site claims that my new password is in the dictionary. I checked the Oxford English Dictionary and 'qwerty1234' is not in it.

We check passwords against a fairly complete dictionary of known passwords, some of which were captured in the wild. For example, the ​RockYou hack ended up revealing the unencrypted passwords for 32 million people (and about 14 million unique passwords). Since that is one of the goto lists for the bad guys, we use it too. This means that a lot of passwords that seem clever and obscure fail our test because someone else thought up the same thing.