10.4: Run an Xgrid with Tiger client

Jun 23, '05 11:08:00AM

Contributed by: DylanMuir

Tiger only hintLovers of Xgrid may have been disappointed with the release of Tiger. Gone is the beautiful Xgrid GUI from Panther, gone is the ability to host a cluster without buying 10.4 Server. All we have left on 10.4 Client is a check box in the Sharing preference pane to start an Xgrid agent and share our idle resources. This is completely useless without an Xgrid controller to manage job submission and migration to agents, functionality which is not available on 10.4 Client. At least, that's what they'd like you to believe! Once again, a couple of command-line tools come to the rescue.

First up is the xgridctl command. This utility allows you to start and stop both the Xgrid controller and agent daemons, as well as automatically add the launchd configurations to load them on startup. xgridctl must be run as root using sudo. com.apple.xgrid.controller.plist, located in /Library/Preferences contains the list of preferences for the Xgrid controller, and com.apple.xgrid.controller.plist.default is an example preference file (with comments describing the alternatives), located in /etc/xgrid/controller. I turned authentication off by setting AgentAuthentication and ClientAuthentication to None.

sudo xgridctl controller start will then load the Xgrid controller, and sudo xgridctl controller on will modify the launchd configuration to run the controller daemon at startup.

As the icing on the cake, you can download the 10.4 Server Admin Tools from apple. Included in this suite is the Xgrid Admin application. As far as I can tell, this is what you get with 10.4 Server to manage the Xgrid controller anyway. Who needs Server?

Xgrid requires some ports opened on the firewall; at least 4111 for administration and probably 4111-4120 and 49200-49500 for communication with agents, from what I can tell. The agent daemon can, of course, be controlled via the Sharing preference pane, but xgridctl has options for that as well. Unfortunately, job submission now seems to be command-line only via the xgrid utility. Check the man page for syntax.

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