Can't build a container on a shared NFS file system

[Ole Holm Nielsen]

I'm trying to deploy Singularity on our Linux cluster, and as an initial test I run the tutorial in https://singularity-tutorial.github.io/

The tutorial instructions fail, however, when I try to build the lolcow container in a normal user's home directory:

$ sudo singularity build --sandbox lolcow Singularity
[sudo] password for XXX:
Building into existing container: lolcow
Using container recipe deffile: Singularity
tar: .: Cannot utime: Permission denied
tar: .: Cannot change ownership to uid 0, gid 0: Operation not permitted
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
ERROR: Failed to export contents of Singularity to lolcow
ABORT: Aborting with RETVAL=255
Cleaning up...

The reason is very obvious: User home directories are NFS mounted without root permissions to the NFS clients (and obviously so, I'd say!).

Request: Please update the tutorial homepage by explicitly instructing users to build containers on a locally mounted storage, for example /tmp.

Request for enhancement: The "singularity build" command should check for root access to the current working directory, and exit with a nice and informative message if this condition is not fulfilled.

Thanks,
Ole

[v]

hey Ole!

I think that github organization is one of Dave's tutorials, and definitely he would be open to updating it! I'll make an issue on the board --> https://github.com/Singularity-tutorial/Singularity-tutorial.github.io/issues so that we get this underway.

Best,

Vanessa

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Vanessa Villamia Sochat
Stanford University '16

(603) 321-0676

[v]

https://github.com/Singularity-tutorial/Singularity-tutorial.github.io/issues/1

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Vanessa Villamia Sochat
Stanford University '16

(603) 321-0676

[David Godlove]

Hi Ole and Vanessa,

Thanks for the heads up V!  This is indeed my handiwork.  Ole, do you have a github handle?  If so we can just chat in the issue thread so that it is "on the record" so to speak.  

Dave