Overview

When a newly provisioned user on a Slurm cluster is attempting to run a Slurm job form the login node, the following error is observed:

srun: error: Unable to create step for job <ID>: Error generating job credential

Prerequisites

• SSH access to Slurm login and head node

Cause

The error is caused due to the user not being provisioned on the Slurm head node. 

Steps

1. Step 1: Provision the user on the Slurm head node and add them to the necessary groups

   • # sudo useradd <user_name> -s /bin/bash -m 
     # sudo usermod -aG <group_name> <user_name>

2. Step 2: Add the new user's SSH key to the authorized keys on the head node
   

   • # echo "<PUBLIC_SSH_KEY>" >> /home/<user_name>/.ssh/authorized_keys