mikem

Overview

The kitops tool is responsible for adding and removing kits to/from a Kusu cluster. A kit is additional software bundled in a specific way, making it easy to outfit your cluster according to your needs.
Some examples of kits are the Nagios or Cacti kits, providing monitoring to your cluster, or the [HPC kit], containing various MPI libraries and related tools. The kitops tool itself, along with the complete suite of Kusu tools, is bundled in our Base Kit.
Operating...

So, you want to build a kit? Enter the buildkit tool, written to make it easier for you to package software for Kusu. Today we’ll explore how buildkit works.

We start by creating the ‘kit workspace’:

$ buildkit new kit=acmetools

OK, we’re building an ACME Tools kit, a fictitious client/server application with a monitoring add-on. Let’s have a look at what this command did:

$ cd acmetools/
acmetools $ ls -l
total 56
...

To make installing software on your cluster straightforward, Kusu supports kits. A kit is a collection of packages usually bundled in an ISO image.

A kit contains the software packaged for the distribution running on your cluster. Packages called components have the software packages as dependencies and are associated to nodegroups. For instance, a kit providing a client/server application may carry two components; the component installed on the “server” node would pull in the application’s...

I was working on a Kusu kit which would pull in all the packages necessary for Kusu development, creatively named the SDK Kit. The goal is you have a fresh Kusu box and want to hack on Kusu, you install this kit and everything you need will be there.

To do this I basically install everything in the Development Tools and Development Libraries yum groups, as well as mkisofs, cmake, and a few other packages. I use our buildkit tool to generate the RPMs and ISO for me. buildkit reads...

As Najib wrote recently, we just released version 0.3_devel of the Kusu Cluster Toolkit. The big new feature is the ability to provision compute nodes.

In today’s screencast we show a compute node PXE-booting the Kusu Node Installer from our master node and proceeding to install Fedora 6 i386. The master node records the new compute node’s details in the cluster database as well as updates dhcpd’s configuration file:

As Najib wrote recently, we just released version...