Issue installing freud on XSEDE comet

[Carl Simon Adorf]

Trying to clone or build freud on the XSEDE Comet system results in the following error:

$ git clone [e-mail]:glotzer/freud.git --recursive
Cloning into 'freud'...
remote: Counting objects: 15968, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (7201/7201), done.
remote: Total 15968 (delta 11281), reused 12791 (delta 8679)
Receiving objects: 100% (15968/15968), 44.93 MiB | 5.57 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (11281/11281), done.
Submodule 'extern/Eigen' (https://github.com/glotzerlab/eigen-git-mirror.git) registered for path 'extern/Eigen'
Submodule 'extern/fsph' (https://bitbucket.org/glotzer/fsph.git) registered for path 'extern/fsph'
Cloning into '/home/csadorf/local/freud/extern/Eigen'...
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/glotzerlab/eigen-git-mirror.git/': SSL connect error
fatal: clone of 'https://github.com/glotzerlab/eigen-git-mirror.git' into submodule path '/home/csadorf/local/freud/extern/Eigen' failed
Failed to clone 'extern/Eigen'. Retry scheduled
Cloning into '/home/csadorf/local/freud/extern/fsph'...
remote: Counting objects: 57, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (55/55), done.
remote: Total 57 (delta 25), reused 0 (delta 0)
Cloning into '/home/csadorf/local/freud/extern/Eigen'...
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/glotzerlab/eigen-git-mirror.git/': SSL connect error
fatal: clone of 'https://github.com/glotzerlab/eigen-git-mirror.git' into submodule path '/home/csadorf/local/freud/extern/Eigen' failed
Failed to clone 'extern/Eigen' a second time, aborting
[csadorf@comet-ln2 local]$ cd freud/extern/
[csadorf@comet-ln2 extern]$ ls
fsph

[Joshua Anderson]

I can repeat this with all github repositories access with https from comet.

github's help page doesn't offer any suggestions. Comet is already running a new enough version of git: https://help.github.com/articles/https-cloning-errors/

Stackoverflow suggests that the openssl library or curl versions might be a problem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29110199/ssl-connect-error-unable-to-push-to-github

In either case, it seems like a pretty serious issue on comet to be unable to access github repositories. We should open a ticket with the system administrators. The problem must be a recent occurrence because I have successfully cloned freud and hoomd repositories on Comet previously.

[Bradley Dice]

@csadorf @joaander Was a ticket opened with Comet's sysadmins? Any ideas on how we should proceed?

[Joshua Anderson]

I did not open a ticket.

[Carl Simon Adorf]

I did not, just because I created so many tickets at the time, but I will this week.

[Bradley Dice]

Waiting on Comet to address this issue.

[Vyas Ramasubramani]

@csadorf did you ever create this ticket? If not, I am happy to do it now.

[Carl Simon Adorf]

No, I forgot.

[Vyas Ramasubramani]

I created the ticket, which can be viewed (here)[https://portal.xsede.org/group/xup/tickets/-/tickets/93066].

The issue is that Comet is still using an older version of Git that doesn't support the newer, stronger cryptographic protocols that are (required by Git as of this February)[https://githubengineering.com/crypto-removal-notice/]. For now, we can get around this by explicitly telling Git to default to the older TLSv1.0 standard using the following:

 git config --global http.sslVersion "tlsv1"

We'll probably want to keep an eye on this so that we can stop as soon as Comet's Git is updated.

[Vyas Ramasubramani]

This is not a freud issue, but rather a Git issue on Comet. I've posted a way to work around this limitation for now, but a better solution will require Comet to update their Git.