Oracle Linux - ClusterShell

When operating large clusters consisting out of large numbers of nodes the desire to be able to execute a command on all, or a subset of nodes, comes quickly. You might want for example to run certain commands on all nodes without having to login to the nodes. When doing configuration solutions like Ansible or Puppet are very good solutions to use. However, for day to day operations they might not be sufficient and you would like to have the option of a distributed shell.

A solution for this is building your own tooling, or you can adopt a solution such as ClusterShell. ClusterShell is a scalable Python Framework, however it is a lot more than that. In the simplest form of usage it is a way to execute commands on groups of nodes in your cluster with a single command. That leaves open the option to do a lot more interesting things with it when you start to look into the options of hooking into the Python API’s and build your own distributed solutions with ClusterShell as a foundation for this.

Installing ClusterShell on Oracle Linux is relative easy and can be done by using the EPEL repository for YUM. Just ensure you have the EPEL repository available. If you have the EPEL respository for Oracle Linux installed you should be able to have the file /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo which (in our case, contains the following repository configuration:

[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6

[epel-debuginfo]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch - Debug
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch/debug
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-debug-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
gpgcheck=1

[epel-source]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch - Source
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/SRPMS
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-source-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
gpgcheck=1

If you do not have this you will have to make sure you locate and download the appropriate epel-release-x-x.noarch.rpm file http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/ . As an example, you could download the file and install it as shown below:

# wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
# rpm -ivh epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

Now you should be able to use YUM to install ClusterShell on Oracle Linux, this can be done by executing the below yum command:

yum install clustershell

To test the installation you can, as an example, execute the below command to verify if clush is installed. Clush is a part of the full ClusterShell installation and being able to interact with it is a good indication of a successful installation.

[root@localhost /]# clush --version
clush 1.7.3
[root@localhost /]# 

To make full use of ClusterShell you will have to start defining your configuration and the nodes you want to be able to control with ClusterShell. The main configuration is done in the configurations file located at: /etc/clustershell . A basic installation should give you the below files in this loaction:

[root@localhost clustershell]# tree /etc/clustershell/
/etc/clustershell/
├── clush.conf
├── groups.conf
├── groups.conf.d
│   ├── genders.conf.example
│   ├── README
│   └── slurm.conf.example
├── groups.d
│   ├── cluster.yaml.example
│   ├── local.cfg
│   └── README
└── topology.conf.example

2 directories, 9 files
[root@localhost clustershell]#