[StarCluster] Adding user accounts without passwordless SSH

[Rayson Ho]

1) The code is there in StarCluster to setup user accounts & passwordless SSH, but it is not directly exposed to the user interface I believe (I still need to hack the code a bit more before I can find the StarCluster way of adding user accounts... so I guess I will let Justin handle this one).

However, there are 2 "un-StarCluster" ways of adding users:

- as root, script a simple for loop that calls SSH to all nodes & execute "groupadd" & "useradd".


- Use a configuration management tool, like Chef (I have some experience with Puppet & IBM Tivoli, but Chef's EC2 integration is *much better* than those offered by others!):


http://bioteam.net/2011/03/dude-you-got-some-chef-in-my-starcluster/

Chef's way of managing users: http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Resources#Resources-User

With a configuration management tool, you can manage the cloud or IT infrastructure like programming. If you are interested in this method, then Chris from the BioTeam is also on this list and may provide further links to docs (I am new to Chef, I will wait for Puppet 2.0 and see how the Puppet-EC2 integration compares before I totally switch to Chef).



2) Your users don't need passwordless SSH to use SGE. StarCluster sets up passwordless SSH for root & sgeadmin by default, and uses SSH to go to each node to setup SGE for the node.

You will need the users' accounts available on each node, or SGE will complain when it tries to run the jobs! (But again, your users don't need passwordless SSH to run jobs in Grid Engine.)


BTW, there's also way to configure SGE to use SSH as the transport protocol for interactive jobs, but it is *totally optional*:


http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/howto/qrsh_qlogin_ssh.html

Rayson

=================================
Grid Engine / Open Grid Scheduler
http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net




----- Original Message -----
From: Jan Paral <jparal at gmail.com>
To: starcluster at mit.edu
Cc: 
Sent: Sunday, October 9, 2011 1:37 PM
Subject: [StarCluster] Adding user accounts without passwordless SSH

Hi,

I have two related questions about user accounts without passwordless SSH:

1) Is there a simple way how to add user accounts besides sgeadmin?
2) Can SGE be set up without the need of passwordless SSH? I guess if
I create additional users on the cluster I dont want them freely ssh
to all nodes.

btw. good job on StarCluster
Jan
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