These are some notes previously hosted on the old gridvm.org website. I wrote it before the GT docs included the GT4 quickstart and the Globus is Modular guide, both of which provide more information on this subject.

Often, you may want to install a subset of the GT4 packages available in the GT4 installer package. The GT Makefile allows you to take a fine grained approach to what gets installed, including the ability to install just the Java core:

$ make wsjava

Installing the core only can be very useful in certain situations, and more so if you have more certificate tools.

Sometimes people will run the above command (”make wsjava”) or download the Java-core-only binary off the GT downloads page (for example if they run Windows) and be surprised to find that there is not support for creating certificates.

Another problem is that the main GT Admin guide assumes you have simply run “make” which gets you those tools (and many components like GridFTP and GRAM), it may be confusing which chapters you can follow. You might assume that since you have Java core only, you can follow the security setup chapters, since Java core supports security.

*nix

If you do not have certificate tools from another Globus installation or do not want to use OpenSSL directly, you can still install enough of the toolkit to get all of the cert/proxy and SimpleCA tools.

With the below invocation, you can still follow the Admin guide’s chapters 5, 6, and 7 to the letter (if you are using *nix).

$ make wsjava globus_proxy_utils globus_simple_ca globus_simple_ca_setup postinstall

That’s it. Now you can follow the admin guide all the way through the security section.

Windows

In a regular (non-Cygwin) Windows environment, it’s different. To install the core with certificate tools in this environment, download the binary or source tarball from the download page. If you want the source tarball, you’ll need to run this after downloading:

$ ant -Dall.scripts=true all

This does not install the SimpleCA however. This installs some wrapper scripts into $GLOBUS_LOCATION/bin that wrap Java versions of some of the certificate tools, e.g., grid-proxy-init. By the way, using these Java tools on Linux is NOT recommended, the input of passwords is not supported correctly by JVMs in Linux ttys.

So how do you get certificates in the first place? If you do not have the ability to obtain signed certificates from a CA, but want to install certificates “from scratch,” one option is to create certificates on another machine or environment (like a Linux box, Cygwin environment, or in a virtual machine) and copy them over to the pure Windows environment.

Another option (that may get documented in the future) is to download the Windows version of OpenSSL and simply use those commandline tools directly (after all, the grid-cert-request and SimpleCA tools are mainly smart wrappers for OpenSSL commands). If you’re up to it, start with this guide to OpenSSL on Windows.

GT Makefile

The GT Makefile contains most of the targets you would likely want to use alone. For example “make wsgram” is all you need to enter to install WS-GRAM and its dependencies.

View the major targets:

$ head -n 61 Makefile

See the Globus is Modular guide for much more information.