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Christopher Williams asks: QuestionAs an avid reader of your site, I’ve someone has a mini set of as a server at home. I also remember reading that you have OS X Server installed. I don’t have OS X server, but would still like to use my mini as a server. Most of what I would like to do is straight forward (set up file and print sharing, ssh access, etc.) with the user version of OS 10.4, but one thing that I would like to accomplish supposedly (I’m thinking that there may be a work around) can only be done on OS X server, which is to set up my mini as an Xgrid Controller. What exactly I’ll do with it I’m not too sure, but I bet it’d be fun trying to find some use if I could. I’m aware that I can set up any OS 10.4 machine to be an Xgrid agent via the Sharing panel in System Preferences. Official Xgrid documentation states that you must have OS X server, but Apple is also known to simply say that something is unsupported, yet it still works. Is there a work around to use a non-server edition of Tiger as an Xgrid controller? AnswerAs of Tiger, all of the Xgrid components are installed, so it’s ridiculously easy to setup. The AgentYou need to setup the agent first because we can use it to make the password file we’ll need to setup the controller. Open System Preferences and go into Sharing. Check off Xgrid and hit Configure. In here, set a password and save (set the settings to your liking). The agent is done. ControllerThis one’s fun. Get into Terminal and become root. Go into /etc/xgrid and … # cp agent/controller-password controller/agent-password # cp agent/controller-password controller/client-password The passwords are set, so let’s get the controller going: # xgridctl c start You can replace ‘c’ with ‘a’ to start the agent. In fact, now that a controller exists, you should restart the agent ( SetupNow, you can go with the default setup and get some Xgrid programs going, or you can edit that setup. If you choose to edit, you can forgo the UsefulnessXgrid sends a program to the client machine to process a job and then pipes the results back to the server. This isn’t a way to distribute your Photoshop filters or Final Cut Pro renders. You need a special client to do this. Some projects exist for this already, like Xgrid@Stanford, and for others you can use the resources at the end of this to create them. It’s real distributed computing, but it’s abstract enough to require some good coding to make it work effectively. More InformationThe following bits in an Xgrid series on O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter go over Xgrid in much more detail and are insanely helpful. Distributed Tiger: Xgrid Comes of Age Sweetening Your Xgrid with Cocoa
About Adam Knight
 Author Biography Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c. In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Switchblade) and has a few other toys coming out soon. Bug him over AIM or email [link fixed]. |
I’ve since discoverd XgridLite (http://edbaskerville.com/software/xgridlite/) which essentialy does the same thing as you described, only with a gui. I may, in order to avoid the $15 charge, write my own Applescript Studio gui to toggle the Xgrid controller based off of your information. Thanks a million. There is also a new video encoding app which supports Xgrid (has its own controller) which I am likely to buy if the developer can get the Xgrid component working correctly. Video was my primary reason for delving into the world of distributed computing, and VisualHub (http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/) will fill that need nicely (assuming that the Xgrid component can be made to work).
As a question, I see the benefits of Xgrid if you have multiple Macs set up as agents, but another I am wondering about (even if there are no speed differences) is would it be beneficial to have only 1 Xgrid agent connected to the controller? I am envisioning passing on all of the work to another computer (the sole agent on the grid), while my main machine (the grid controller) goes about its daily business without worrying about the processor load of encoding video. Is my theory here correct, or am I missing something?
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I’ve got the Xgrid client up and running, but I can’t seem to pass any arguments where I see results. I’m trying really simple stuff to ensure that it works, but I can’t see anything that would be proof that the work was done by the grid.
I am trying …
xgrid -h servername.local -job submit mkdir ~/Desktop/testDirectory/
According to all of the documentation that I have read, this command ought to produce a new directory on my desktop, but being “special” because it was created by another computer other than the one where I issued the command. According to the Xgrid Admin application available as part of the free Server Admin Tools suite, the job is submitted and completed (the logs in my console verify this). But there is no new folder on my desktop. I also tried the most basic command which is present in Apple’s documentation (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=ServerAdmin/10.4/en/c4xg2.html), but I don’t see the echo in my terminal.
I have configured the agents on the network correctly according to your original reply. What could be the problem?
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