Hi folks,
I was able to get my head node installed and can now boot it via the YUMI Linux installer USB. (I still don’t know why this is necessary, but hey, it works.) Now I have two issues:
How do I add nodes to the cluster? I tried doing this with qluman-qt. I go to Manage Hosts and New Hosts, where it sees the MAC from one of my nodes. If I try to add it to the cluster I get a SQL error from Python about how it cannot insert a new record without the “status” field. Like so:
If I click either “Add Selected” or “Add Host” here, I get this:
Which seems to be generated from this SQL insert:
The procedure for adding hosts actually doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere. I thought maybe I could try it from the command line, but there also doesn’t seem to be any documentation for the qluman-cli utility. I’m not entirely sure how the host abstraction works in Qlustar. My front-end/head node’s hostname is “argo,” yet the only thing in the host database visible in qluman-qt that seems to map to this is “beosrv-c.” Where did that name come from?
The next steps I would like to get to are as follows:
- Add my two compute nodes to the cluster
- Add the NFS NAS I built to be a “scratch” filesystem available across all nodes
- Install some bioinformatics software (a good resource for this in Qlustar would be a big help)
- Make the cluster able to authenticate users via an Active Directory instance — I have a hard time understanding users in Qlustar. There is a very brief blurb in the administration guide about sssd.conf being replicated to each machine in the cluster, but the hostname in SSSD would have to be different for each node, so I don’t think that works for AD unless Qlustar is doing some kind of templating with the names. The other issue here is that when you join Linux machines to Active Directory and users log in, no entry is created in /etc/passwd, so if user process work is being kept track of with those, it won’t work. Unless the typical method for authenticating users is to use “plain” LDAP somehow without actually performing an AD join and just manually creating users that are then only authenticated against LDAP, and replicated between hosts normally because they’re “regular” UNIX users? That would also be fine; the problem here is that I can’t figure out how users are supposed to work. I added a user via qluman-qt and it appears not to have been added to /etc/passwd either, and since I have not yet configured SSSD I can’t figure out what those users are for. I can’t log in to SSH with them.
I know that’s a lot at once; TIA.
Jarett