Yes. There are two ways you account may expire. First, in order to create your MASS account you will have been added as a Guest account to the Met Office’s system. The Guest account will prompt you to confirm continued access via email. Secondly, your JASMIN mass additional service will expire after 500 days. You will be able to request an extension.

If you see the message LOGIN_EXPIRED this is your session that has expired, not your account. See the FAQ below for how to log back in if you see this message.

There are two reasons that may result in you being prompted for a password when attempting to login to the MASS client machine (mass-cli.jasmin.ac.uk).

The first is if you do not have permission to access the machine. A quick method to check is to verify if you are a member of the moose user group. It should be listed when you use the groups command whilst logged into a JASMIN login node:

groups
moose

If the moose group is not listed, please contact: monsoon@metoffice.gov.uk

The second is if you forget the -A option for agent forwarding when you SSH to a JASMIN login node. You can test for this condition by listing loaded identities on the login node, and finding you have none:

ssh-add -l
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

If this happens, please exit back to your local machine and SSH in again using the -A flag or tick the relevant box for “agent forwarding”.

You can’t, but you can edit your SSH configuration so that it automatically enables you to jump through the intermediary login servers.

Add the following to your home institute SSH config file ($HOME/.ssh/config file):

Host mass-cli 
    User your_jasmin_userid 
    HostName mass-cli.jasmin.ac.uk
    ProxyCommand ssh -YA -t your_jasmin_userid@login.jasmin.ac.uk -W %h:%p 2>/dev/null

You should then be able to login directly using:

$ ssh mass-cli

Please note that this only works if you are using OpenSSH version 5.4 or greater as earlier versions do not support the -W flag. You can check your version using: ssh -v

When re-authentication is required, you will see an error of LOGIN_EXPIRED. This could be prompted at any time and on each different device that you use MASS from (Monsoon, JASMIN, MASS Portal, etc.).

Run moo login --device-code and follow the prompts.

Please contact your sponsor. They can then complete this form  if they also agree you require access.

Please note that the link above is only visible to those in the Met Office.

The problem: You are running a model over a period of several days or weeks, and you need to analyse the output of the model as it runs. You have a moo get or moo select command that you run to fetch the data that is available. You want to be able to re-run it to fetch the files or fields that have been added to MASS since you last ran the command, but you do not want it to waste time re-fetching things you already have.

The solution: Use the -i or --fill-gaps option when you run moo get or moo select. This option tells MOOSE that you only want to fetch files that don’t already exist in the specified local directory. Note that MASS works out where gaps are by doing checks to see if files of the expected name exist in your destination directory, so it won’t behave correctly if you rename files after you have retrieved them, or if you use the -C option with moo select which condenses all the matching fields into a single file.

You might also find the -g / --get-if-available option to moo get useful. This tells MOOSE to get every file from your moo get list that is available, but ignore ones that are not there rather than exit with an error. This could help if you are expecting files to be archived at some point but are not sure whether they will be there when your job runs. If you use this option MOOSE will get as much as it can from your list without bailing out.