Monday, 8 February 2010

X-Grid setup

So, I've managed to get all the Apple Macs in Art and Design Directorate at Chesterfield College! I should hopefully reach 400GHz when all the machines are finally switched on. Here's the general gist of how I did it:


  1. Set up Xserve with XGrid. I did have a problem switching on XGrid but that was fixed on my previous post. Go to "Server Admin" and set it as the Controller. I didn't make it an agent as I didn't want to slow it down (it's only a G4). It's as simple as that
  2. Check XGrid is working by going to your machine and loading "Xgrid Admin". Now connect to your Xserver and all should be there (no agents though)
  3. Set the clients up. This can be done in two ways, Workgroup Manager or Apple Remote Desktop.
    1. I used a combination. I set up my machine by going to the Sharing Pane in System Preferences and clicking "XGrid" and specifying the servers address (DNS). Not using authentication at the moment.
    2. Now go to Workgroup Manager and manage computer groups and preferences, go to Details and add: "/Library/Preferences/com.apple.xgrid.agent" and I always make the changes "Always". This should put these preferences on all the machines in this group.
    3. Start the service on each client machine. I did this through ARD's command line. I've also put how to change preferences on the client machines if Workgroup Manager doesn't work (run as Root):
      1. sudo xgridctl a stop
      1. sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.xgrid.agent ControllerName xserve.chesterfield.ac.uk
      2. sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.xgrid.agent ControllerAuthentication None
      3. sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.xgrid.agent BindToFirstAvailable 0
      4. sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.xgrid.agent ResolveNameAsNetService 0
      5. sudo defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.xgrid.agent
      6. sudo xgridctl a start
      7. sudo xgridctl a status
Now everything should be working and through XGrid Admin you should see all the clients connecting. Next thing to do is to submit some jobs!

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