EUMETSAT is establishing a new set of data access services that will bring the full data catalog online.  Some more information can be found here, in particular, the Data Store:

https://www.eumetsat.int/website/home/Data/DataDelivery/NewPilotDataServices/index.html

At the initial opening of EWC to users, these services were not yet fully tested, populated or widely-accessible.  Even once the services are open, it will still take time to fully populate them.

As a workaround for this intermediate period, virtual machines on the EUMETSAT cloud are able to mount an NFS share holding selected datasets.  This server will be maintained until it is no longer needed.

Mounting the EUMETSAT NFS data archive

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Setting up your instance

In order to mount the NFS drive, first, you need to create the Virtual Machine instances in the Morpheus UI. Currently, data access works both operating systems provided by European Weather Cloud (CentOS and Ubuntu) and requires no additional configuration. You can follow the Provision a new instance - web Knowledge Base Article to get started with the provisioning.

Mounting NFS Share

After logging in to the virtual machine that you want to access the EUMETAT EUMETSAT data, all you need is to do is mount the NFS drive that rests on 198.18.255.11 to onto the directory that where you want it mounted. In order to do that, please follow the below steps;

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.  You will need sudo permissions or root access to accomplish the major steps here.

1. Verify access to the NFS server

   1. You can see all exported file systems

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1. 1. on the EUMETSAT NFS server without mounting it

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1. 1. using the showmount command like in the example below

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1. 1. :

      Code Block
      language bash
      karatosun@myfirstvm ~$ showmount --

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1. 1. exports 198.18.255.11 Export list for 198.18.255.11:

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1. 1. ... (lot of text, but should include) /ifs/data/

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1. 1. EUMETSAT_DATA /ifs/data/EUMETCAST

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1. 1. ...

      
      

   2. If you receive an error (e.g. timeout), please refer to the troubleshooting section below.

2.  Create the (empty) directory where you'll mount the NFS share

   1. You can place this anywhere you wish; we have chosen /eumetsatdata in the example here

this command will return all the possible mount points.

2. Create the directory

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1. 1. Code Block
      language bash
      karatosun@myfirstvm ~$ sudo mkdir /eumetsatdata

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1. 1. karatosun@myfirstvm ~$ sudo echo "run sudo mount -a" > /eumetsatdata/NFS_NOT_MOUNTED # put a placeholder file in the directory to make it clear what's (not) happened karatosun@myfirstvm ~$ sudo chmod a+rX,go-w /eumetsatdata # minimise write permissions to prevent mistakes if the mount isn't there

      
      

   2. The last two commands add a little extra safety for the case that the directory is unexpectedly not mounted

2. Mount NFS drive to the mount point

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1. 1. This command will do a once-off mount.   If it works, you may wish to make it permanent as described in step 5

      Code Block
      language bash
      karatosun@myfirstvm ~$ sudo mount 198.18.255.11:/ifs/data/EUMETSAT_DATA /eumetsatdata

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4. Permanent NFS mounting (optional)

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1. 1. 
      

   2. If you receive an error (e.g. timeout), please refer to the troubleshooting section below.

2. If step 3 worked, you can now navigate to the /eumetsatdata directory and list all the available data with the ls -lah command

   
   

   Code Block
   language bash
   [karatosun@myfirstvm ~]$ cd /eumetsatdata/ [karatosun@myfirstvm eumetsatdata]$ ls -lah total 192K drwxrwxrwx. 7 nobody nobody 124 May 26 13:00 . dr-xr-xr-x. 19 root root 260 Jul 6 13:00 .. drwxrwsr-x. 5 1002 1002 101 Nov 7 2018 eumetcast drwxr-xr-x. 3 nobody nobody 24 Apr 23 2018 mviri drwxr-xr-x. 4 nobody nobody 52 May 28 17:26 seviri

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1. 
   

   1. Note that the ownerships and permissions will generally be "nobody"

2. Making the NFS mount permanent and persistant across reboots (optional)

   1. Edit

1. 1. /etc/fstab file of the

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1. 1. VM with your editor of choice

      Code Block
      language bash
      karatosun@myfirstvm ~$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

      
      

   2. and add the following line

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1. 1. Code Block
      language bash
      198.18.255.11:/ifs/data/EUMETSAT_DATA /eumetsatdata nfs defaults 0 0

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1. 1. 
      

   2. A complete example of a /etc/fstab can be seen

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1. 1. in the block below (do not copy all of this!)

      Code Block
      language bash collapse true

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1. 1. # /etc/fstab # Created by anaconda on Thu Aug 8 12:37:33 2019 # # Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk' # See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info # UUID=3ef2b806-efd7-4eef-aaa2 / xfs defaults 0 0 # mount the EUMETSAT NFS server to /eumetsatdata 198.18.255.11:/ifs/data/EUMETSAT_DATA /eumetsatdata nfs defaults 0 0

      
      

   2. To test the persistent configuration, unmount the share, then try to automatically remount it:

      Code Block
      language bash
      karatosun@myfirstvm ~$ sudo umount /eumetsatdata karatosun@myfirstvm ~$ sudo mount -a

      
      

   3. If you see an error and the manual mount worked previously, please check for typos!

      
      

Troubleshooting

Limitations

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Timeout / network connectivity: test that you can ping the NFS server with ping 198.18.255.11  If not, you have a routing, firewalling or security group issue.  Assuming a default setup, the most likely issue is a security group problem.  Until we provide a knowledgebase article, please contact us.

Limitations

1. Access to the archive is read-only

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1. .  This is a technical limitation due to the way the NFS server is mapped into the VM's address space.
2. Only a limited subset of EUMETSAT data is available.  At the time of writing, this included Meteosat L1.5 data, a cloud type dataset and a few example files from EUMETCAST.  Please contact us if you need something that is not currently there.

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