Scyld, local access to nodes, and master node as compute node

[Brian C Merrell]

I'm using Scyld Linux on a 24 node cluster.  Everything installed fine,
and I'm fairly happy with it so far; beowulf has come a long way since I
last played with it about two years ago.  But I have a few questions on
how to set some things up.

1) How can I get access to a specific node?  Some of the researchers I'm
supporting want to use only part of the cluster at a time (so that other
chunks are free for use, I suppose).  How can they access a specific node
and run programs from it?  There doesn't appear to be any rlogind (or rsh,
or telnet, or even a local /etc/passwd file, or ...) to accept
connections.  bpsh won't give me a shell, so that won't work.

2) How can I use the master node as an active compute node (node0)?
Running bpslave 192.168.1.1 2223 (so from the master to the master)
doesn't seem to work, although maybe I'm really misunderstanding how this
is supposed to work?

3) While I'm at it, a few other things: is it possible to define hostnames
for the nodes?  Obviously the master is a (mostly) normal installation
that I can add to the hosts file or use DNS, but what about the slave
nodes?  We'd like to have it so the master is l001 and the slaves are l002
through l024 (that first character is a lowercase 'L', BTW).

-brian

-- 
Brian C. Merrell      P a t r i o t  N e t      Systems Staff
brian at patriot.net    http://www.patriot.net    (703) 277-7737
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