Remote Administration and Monitoring

Scyld ClusterWare provides a variety of tools for remotely monitoring and administering clusters. These include traditional shell and X window based tools, along with web based tools. Some utilities are available for users to monitor the system, while others are for administrators to configure the cluster.

Command Line Tools

The RHEL CentOS base distribution includes openssh. This tool allows you to securely ssh into your master node and manually edit /etc/beowulf/config, and modify /etc/beowulf/init.d/ scripts, /etc/beowulf/conf.d/ configuration files, and base distribution configuration files on the master node. For more information on the configuration files and command line utilities, see Configuring the Cluster Manually.

X Forwarding

SSH can also be configured to do X forwarding, which allows the GUI applications to be run on a remote machine. This allows you to use the full functionality of the convenient graphics tools, but can be slow, especially if the connection to the cluster is not via a local area network. In order to activate X forwarding, you may need to use the -X option to ssh from your client. Once the X forwarding is setup, you can use any of the GUI tools described throughout this manual.