Before using jFed

Get An Account

You will need an account at a user authority in order to work with jFed. Your account determines which testbeds you have access to.

You can get an account from:

  • Fed4FIRE International and European Testbeds

  • GENI International and US Testbeds

Get your certificate (optional)

jFed works with X.509 certificates to authenticate and authorize experimenters on testbeds. If you have an account at the Fed4fire or Geni authority, jFed will can retrieve these for you. Just start jFed and select your authority.

You can download and use the certificates manually as well (this might be required if you use other tools than jFed).

Fetching your Fed4FIRE certificate

You can use a Fed4FIRE certificate to log in to jFed.

If you don’t have a Fed4FIRE certificate, please refer to the Fed4FIRE documentation on how to get an account and certificate

Once you are logged in to your account at `https://authority.ilabt.iminds.be`_ you can download the certificate needed to login to jFed. Look for the Download your certificate link.

Note

If jFed is installed, you can also start it directly from this site. If you do so, you will need to login again inside jFed, and your certificate will be fetched by jFed.

Fetching your GENI certificate

If you have a GENI account, you can fetch the certificate from the portal as follows:

  1. Go to the GENI portal and log in

  2. click on Profile

  3. click on SSL

  4. Download your certificate and private key as shown in the screenshot below.

_images/geniportal.PNG

Create an SSH key (optional)

Access to testbed resources is typically done through SSH and more specifically SSH based on public/private key authentication. If you already have an SSH key, you can skip this.

If not, follow this tutorial to create an SSH key: http://doc.fed4fire.eu/createsshkey.html

Note

Optionally, you can choose not to use a custom SSH key. In that case, jFed will use the SSH key used to authenticate you.