CTF Tools

Using the CTF DataEditor with a Singularity Container

The current version of the CTF DataEditor tool runs under CentOS (Linux) version 6.9. To support the MEG user community, we have a Singularity container for CentOS 6.9 containing the necessary libraries to run the DataEditor tool. This allows MEG users to run the DataEditor under the operating system (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux) of their choice.

Singularity is a Operating-system-level virtualization solution where an operating system can host another operating system in an isolated container. To run a Singularity container on your operating system, you need to install the Singularity software for your operating system. There are install packages for the major operating systems from the Singularity website.

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Singularity container running CentOS 6.9 with the CTF DataEditor tool

Singularity container ctf-6.1.14-beta.img download

Usage: singularity shell --bind /data:/mnt/data ctf-6.1.14-beta.img

where the /data file system holds your CTF data set and mounts under /mnt/data inside the container

(your /home directory and the /tmp file systems are automatically visible inside the container)

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felix.nih.gov users

ssh -X login@felix.nih.gov

Copy the ctf-6.1.14-beta.img to your /data directory.

Either add module load singularity to your ~/.bashrc startup file or type this on the command line.

Use the following bash script to shell into the singularity container.

#!/bin/bash
# goctf.sh

singularity shell --bind /data/username:/mnt/data ctf-6.1.14-beta.img
killall -s msgd 2>/dev/null

The DataEditor communicates with other CTF tools using the msgd service and the DataEditor will automatically launch this service if it isn't running. The trouble on felix.nih.gov is this service is not killed when you exit from the singularity container and you will end up with a persistent process on felix. To prevent this from occurring, make sure msgd goes away.

You may want to add this stanza to your ~/.bashrc file on felix.nih.gov. This sets both the command prompt and the command history format for your shell inside the container

if [ ! -z "$SINGULARITY_CONTAINER" ]; then
## PS1 is set inside the container
  HISTFILE=~/.bash_history
  HISTTIMEFORMAT='%Y%m%d/%H:%M:%S '
else
  export PS1='[\h \w]$ '
fi

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CTF tools native download

Instead of installing the Singularity container, you can also install the tools natively; you will need to install the necessary 32-bit libraries by hand.

ctf-6.1.14.tgz download