[Pkg-gridengine-devel] pkg-gridengine first steps

[Michael Banck]

Hi,

sorry, I wanted to mail earlier but I was a bit busy over the weekend
visiting my parents.

Anyway, I checked in the debian/ directory of my old work on gridengine
to svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-gridengine/trunk/debian , comment very
welcome.

Last night, I managed to get a trivial job executed for the first time.

There's no configuration done at all for now (except for providing a
generic bootstrap configuration file for a generic cluster) but I've
checked in a file debian/README.Debian which outlines what kind of
commands one needs to run to get gridengine started, and (rather
specific to my notebook right now) to configure a test queue etc.

There's also debian/TODO which lists the (IMHO) missing stuff, feel free
to add to it.

Probably the most pressing right now is figuring out how to run the
client programs without having to set environment variables (their
startup expects SGE_ROOT SGE_QMASTER_PORT and SGE_EXECD_PORT to be set).
Maybe we can hardcode the first one to /var/lib/gridengine (if $SGE_ROOT
is set, it would take precedence, of course), and get the other two from
/etc/services (there's support for this already).  We just need to get
some ports (which?) allocated here.  I've never had to bother with this
in Debian myself, anybody know where to request this?

The daemons aren't a problem, they could just source
/etc/default/gridengine in their init scripts (to be written) or so.

Long-term (Lenny release) it might be nice to have debconf configuration
(I don't really know debconf either, I admit), but short-term some
reasonably sane default configuration should be doable, at least for the
time being with gridengine in unstable.

Using sgeadmin as admin user seems reasonable to me, just getting a
dynamically allocated system uid/gid seems enough for me. However, does
it make sense to have that user at all? If somebody knows about the
security implications etc., please speak up.

The good thing is that gridengine is highly configurable at runtime, so
the whole $SGE_ROOT business doesn't look so bad after a closer look.

I haven't really tested what happens if you shutdown/restart the
qmaster/execd servers, it needs to be tested whether the configuration
is retained in this case. 

Maintainer: is currently set to the not-yet-existing list
pkg-gridengine-maint at lists.alioth.debian.org, does it make sense to
create this one (for bug report/upload spam etc), or should we keep
just use pkg-gridengine-devel?

I've built packages for etch and uploaded them to 
deb http://people.debian.org/~mbanck/gridengine-etch/ ./
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~mbanck/gridengine-etch/ ./
if somebody wants to try them (or just build them from source)

Hrm, that's it for now I guess.


cheers,

Michael