How to set up the MDS (GRIS-GIIS) service

I finally got around to setting up GRIS servers on all our cluster nodes, which now all report to the GIIS server on our gatekeeper, ouhep1.

All path names are relative to $GLOBUS_DEPLOY_PATH, which here is /opt/globus. This setup relies on either having that area cross mounted on all nodes -- I moved /opt to /usr/local (for various reasons) and then soft linked it from all machines -- or having a local copy on each machine.

You will need to change four globus setup scripts -- I just added a -gris to the name of the modified scripts:

sbin/SXXglobus-gris -- start only >sbin/grid-info-soft-register instead of all globus daemons;

etc/grid-info-resource-register-gris.conf -- register each host with the GIIS server on the gatekeeper ($GLOBUS_HOSTNAME is defined at the beginning of SXXglobus-gris);

etc/grid-info-resource-slapd-gris.conf -- define different libexec/grid-info-resource-search[-gris];

libexec/grid-info-resource-search-gris -- define separate log directory for each node (cache_dir=${localstatedir}/grid-info-resource-cache-`hostname`).

The last two are probably not necessary if you have separate /opt partitions on each machine. Just make sure to change SXXglobus-gris accordingly.

So, just copy the three grid-info-resource-* scripts to their respective location, use SXXglobus-gris as the system startup/shutdown file in /etc/rc.d/*.d/, and you should be in business.

Unless you have condor as one of your job schedulers, then you'll have to fix another bug first. Namely in etc/grid-info-resource.conf, you'll need to add the following to the line that defines the condor output:

... -condor-arch INTEL -condor-os LINUX

This should be picked up in etc/globus-jobmanager-condor.conf, but it isn't for some reason.

I also wrote a little script that, depending on how you call it, info-search or info-host-search, will either poll a host's GIIS or GRIS server. Maybe you'll find it useful.

If you encounter any problems or inaccuracies with this documentation, please let me know.


Horst Severini <hs@mail.nhn.ou.edu>
Last modified: Thu Mar 21 11:24:40 CST 2002