Ch. 1 - Installing and
Configuring Linux

Setting Up Accounts

Ch. 2 - Deploying Torque (Open PBS)

Ch. 3 - Deploying Sun Grid Engine (SGE)

Ch. 4 - Deploying The PostgreSQL Relational Database

Ch. 5 - Fixing Java and ANT

Ch. 6 - Deploying The Globus Toolkit 4.0.x

Ch. 7 - Connecting Globus Gram WS and Torque (Open PBS)

Ch. 8 - Connecting Globus Gram WS and SUN Grid Engine

Ch. 9 - A Distributed Grid Application

Chapter 1: Installing and Configuring Linux

Installing Linux

Start with the following system configuration:
View Illustration

The connection to the internet is required to allow the effective use of YUM and for connection to time servers which will ensure that machine times are correct. The servers used in this demo had the following specs:

Processor: Pentium 4 2GHz
RAM: 1GB
Disk: 160GB

There is no reason other systems, including "hardware that has been laying around for awhile" wouldn't work, provided the specs are reasonably similar.

The files for this tutorial, including the Linux installs will take about 6GB of disk space on each machine. Additional space will be required for the last chapter, Running a Distributed Grid Application. The necessary space needed is determined by the size of the video files being encoded. Since these files can be quite large is would be wise to assume an additional 10GB of file manipulation space will be needed.

Using the following operating system: Fedora Core Version 4

Downloaded from: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/iso/

The following 4 iso files:

FC4-i386-disc1.iso 06-Jun-2005 22:54 635M
FC4-i386-disc2.iso 06-Jun-2005 22:55 638M
FC4-i386-disc3.iso 06-Jun-2005 22:56 638M
FC4-i386-disc4.iso 06-Jun-2005 22:57 630M

Create four FC/4 installation CDs from the downloaded iso images.

They are big downloads, so one should absolutely do a checksum verification against these images before creating CDs.

When installing Linux, the first thing Fedora Core asks is if it should test the media before installing, absolutely do this.

Installation is pretty straight forward. The installer asks questions and the user answers. Here are some rough notes that should help guide you through configuration:

Language: English (default)
Keyboard: US English (default)

Regardless of what the "Upgrade Examine" dialogue says, I forced a fresh install.

Installation Type: Server

Disk Partition:
Automatic Partitioning: Remove all partitions.
Boot loader: GRUB (default): no boot loader password
Automatically partition under the default partition parameters.

Network Devices:
This is where you installation may vary. While the initial string of the hostnames should be the same, the domain, IP address, netmask, gateway and DNS will most likely be different depending on the network parameters of your institution. The parameters for machines nodeA, nodeB, and nodeC used to create this demo are listed below. If you do not understand these parameters, or why yours may be different, the rest of this demo will probably be very difficult.

Note: In this tutorial nodeA, nodeB, and nodeC are the actual host names of the machines. Be sure to set them up as such.

nodeA
--------
IP: 192.168.31.39
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Hostname: nodeA.ps.univa.com
Gateway: 192.168.31.1
Primary DNS: 192.168.31.10

nodeB
--------
IP: 192.168.31.40
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Hostname: nodeB.ps.univa.com
Gateway: 192.168.31.1
Primary DNS: 192.168.31.10

nodeC
--------
IP: 192.168.31.41
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Hostname: nodeC.ps.univa.com
Gateway: 192.168.31.1
Primary DNS: 192.168.31.10

Firewall: No firewall - Disable SELinux

Set timezone to your proper timezone

Root password: globusdemo

WARNING! If you haven't figured it out already we are instructing you to set up a very unsecure network AND we just told you what root password to use. Depending on where this grid subnet sits in relation to a corporate firewall and the Internet at large, bad things could happen if bad people are lurking about.

Packages to select:
Xwindows
Gnome

Applications:
Editors
Graphical Internet
Text based internet

Server:
Server configuration tools
Web server
Windows File Server
Postgres SQL Database

Development:
Development tools
Java Development

System:
Admin tools
System tools
Printing Support

Start download.

When download is complete remove media and press reboot.

A welcome screen guides you through initial configuration.

Yes to License Agreement

Date and Time: Network Time Protocol: Enable Network Time Protocol

Keep the defaults, 0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org, 2.pool.ntp.org

Display Selection: This will of course depend on your monitor resolution, but 1024x768 with millions of color depth is probably pretty safe.

System User: create a user name "systemuser" with the password "systemuser" - this step isn't really necessary as these accounts will not be used, but it is always nice to have a miscellaneous user account available.

You will be prompted for additional CDs. For the purposes of this tutorial, there are none.

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