Index / StoRM user setup

StoRM user setup  

The StoRM Frontend, Backend and WebDAV services run by default as user storm. This user is created by StoRM rpms but it’s a good practice to initialize it before components installation.

You can use the following commands to create the StoRM user on the machines where you are deploying the services:

useradd -M storm

The option -M means ‘without an home directory’. You could also use specific user and group IDs as follows:

useradd -M storm -u 1234 -g 1234

On CentOS 7 nodes you can use cnafsd-storm Puppet module to initialize the needed users. This can be done by using storm::users class as follow:

Create default storm and edguser:

# add storm and edguser users and groups
include storm::users

Or customize users and groups:

class { 'storm::users':
  # The list of defined users. In this case: storm and edguser have been defined.
  # Refer to puppetlabs/accounts Accounts::User::Hash
  # https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-accounts/blob/main/types/user/hash.pp
  users  => {
    'edguser' => {
      'comment' => 'Edguser user',
      'groups'  => [ edguser, storm, ],
      'uid'     => '1200',
      'gid'     => '1200',
      'home'    => '/home/edguser',
    },
    'storm' => {
      'comment' => 'StoRM user',
      'groups'  => [ storm, edguser, ],
      'uid'     => '1000',
      'gid'     => '1000',
      'home'    => '/home/storm',
    },
  },
  # Any other group different from storm and edguser
  # Refer to puppetlabs/accounts Accounts::Group::Hash
  # https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-accounts/blob/main/types/group/hash.pp
  groups => { },
}

Keep UIDs and GIDs aligned for StoRM users and groups on distributed deployments (i.e. when the services are installed on different machines).

User file limits  

It’s recommended to raise the number of open files for storm user. Put these settings in /etc/security/limits.conf or in a file contained in the /etc/security/limits.d directory (recommended):

storm hard nofile 65535
storm soft nofile 65535

Edit the total amount of opened files as your needed.

Storage Area’s permissions  

All the Storage Areas managed by StoRM needs to be owned by storm user. This means that, for example, the storage-area test root directory permissions must be:

drwxr-x---+  2 storm storm

The site administrator has to take care of it. To set the correct permissions on a storage area, you can launch the following commands (assuming that storm runs as user storm, which is the default):

chown -RL storm:storm <sa-root-directory>
chmod -R 750 <sa-root-directory>

Site administrator must also make traversable by other users the parent directories of each storage-area root directory (that’s usually the same directory for all the storage-areas):

chmod o+x <sa-root-directory-parent>

Index / StoRM user setup