[Beowulf] quick and dirty method for starting job on another node?

[Jakob Oestergaard]

On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 03:19:23PM -0400, Robert G. Brown wrote:
...
> > 
> > The SSH scheme I had tried, but I am also looking for other "clever" ideas, 
> > potentially with a smaller footprint. (Tiny, feeble, diskless nodes)

rsh

> You could probably write a task spawning xinetd daemon in a few hours
> that would do it if you didn't care at all about security.

And if you really really want to re-write what already exists  :)

> inetd's just
> process stdin and stdout -- one can be a simple loop script.  Connect,
> tell it what to run, have it fork the task in the background and die.

rsh-server

> Any good systems person would shoot you, of course, for putting any such
> thing on an open network.

rsh  :)

> Doing a real forking daemon that could also run optionally as an inetd,
> using my nice template for a forking/inetd, would take about half a
> day's work and might be a bit more robust or the ability to handle at
> least some error conditions. That would let you trade off running
> xinetd at all vs running a static-compiled forking daemon.

apt-get install rsh-client rsh-server

> Let me know if you want example code 

apt-get source rsh

> -- the "xmlbenchd" project I'm
> working on is frozen with little more than the generic daemon finished;
> I haven't done the script version but I've seen inetd examples that
> aren't more than a dozen lines or so of code.  To be robust probably
> would take more effort, but not THAT much more effort.  Even taskmaster
> could probably be hacked to do it... and give you the ability to do more
> complex things as well, at the expense of loading up perl.  I think that
> you can write a inetd daemon in plain old bash, though.

Guys - rsh is bad for security and silly in many ways, but re-inventing
it is, well, worse.

-- 

 / jakob