Frequently Encountered Problems

I can't log in

There are two most likely sources of this problem

Password won't work

The most frequent cause is having your visitor (non-ORNL internal password) wrong, or having had it expire. See https://xcams.ornl.gov to address this. If you are ORNL staff, a frequent cause is a failure to keep your internal ORNL systems password up to date (UCAMS) or have missed required training. ExCL makes the same check that any ORNL system makes as to whether a password is valid or an account exists (you will not be able to differentiate the two errors based on the login failure). This will look like

$ ssh login.excl.ornl.gov
[email protected]'s password:
Permission denied, please try again.

Too many login attempts from a given IP address

ExCL limits logins to five consecutive failures within a short period of time. After that limit exceeded, login attempts from your IP address will be blocked. This might look like

$ ssh login.excl.ornl.gov
ssh: connect to host login.excl.ornl.gov port 22: Operation timed out

To have this addressed, report your IP address to [email protected]. If you are on an ORNL network, you can use the usual native tools on your system to find your IP address. If you are at home and on a network using NAT (as most home networks do) use What Is My IP? Best Way To Check Your Public IP Address to determine your public IPv4 address when external to the lab. Note that this will not report the correct address if you are on an ORNL (workstations or visitor) network.

I can’t clone my git repo

The recommended approach for accessing git repositories in ExCL is to use the SSH protocol instead of the HTTPS protocol for private repositories and either protocol for public repositories. However, both approaches will work with the proper proxies, keys, applications passwords, and password managers in place.

To use the SSH protocol you must first setup SSH keys to the git website (i.e. GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket). See Git - Setup Git access to code.ornl.gov | ExCL User Docs (ornl.gov) for details for how to do this for code.ornl.gov. The other Git Clouds have similar methods to add SSH keys to your profile.

Since the worker nodes are behind a proxy. You must setup an SSH jump host in your .ssh/config to access Git SSH servers. See Git - Git SSH Access | ExCL User Docs (ornl.gov) to verify that you have set up the proper lines in your SSH Config.

I need a newer version of pip

See Python | ExCL User Docs for instructions on how to set up a Python virtual environment with the latest version of pip.

I need a newer version of Python

See Python | ExCL User Docs for instructions on how to use UV to set up a Python virtual environment with a specific python version.

I can't access git/web/whatever from within Docker

Docker does not pick up user environment variables when a container is started, nor does it pick up variables from the Docker daemon. These environment variables are required for Docker to access services outside of the ExCL environment (via a squid proxy).

This can be done by creating ~/.docker/config.json with the contents:

{
    "proxies":
    {
        "default":
        {
            "httpProxy": "http://proxy.ftpn.ornl.gov:3128",
            "httpsProxy": "https://proxy.ftpn.ornl.gov:3128"
        }
    }
}