How to create user in Rocks

Creating user in Rocks is simple. And also because of the availability of lots of scripting tools build into the operating system made exporting username and password to client nodes is much more simpler than before.

Before I use Rocks in my cluster, I had used Red Hat 7.0, 7.3, 8.0, 8.1, 9.0, Fedora Core, FC2 and Slackware 9, 10, and 11 in my cluster. Except Slackware 11 where I'm tinkering with LDAP to do some authentication, I used NIS (Network Information Services) to manage the authentication at client nodes. At those time, I'm not that good in creating script using BASH or CSH (still not good today). But I managed to create some script to add user based on input file.

So, back to the topic. How to create user(s) in Rocks? Simple.

1. Use useradd command to a new user.
$ useradd myUser

2. Create password for the user
$ passwd myUser
Changing password for user myUser
New UNIX password :
Retype new UNIX password :
passwd : all authentication tokens updated successfully

After you sending the particular to the user, remind the user to change the password. It is a good practice if you can integrate some sort of tools to test the strong'ness' of user's password.

3. Use command rocks-user-sync to send the user's details throughout the cluster.
$ rocks-user-sync

There are many output will be displayed to your screen. Don't panic. It's means the process work smoothly (unless it mentioned fail somewhere in the output)

4. Ask your user to try to login into the account. You can do the test by login into the account. Or if you create 100 or more accounts, you can pick random account to test. After you login into the account, test login into other nodes in the cluster by using ssh. Lets say I has a compute node name compute-0-0.

$ ssh compute-0-0

5. If the client didn't prompt password during login, its mean everything works fine. Or if its prompt password and you can successfully login without any problem, it also means everything works fine.

There are other test to run to make sure the user's accounts work fine.

1. NFS test
Copy any file into the user account in the main node (or any node). If the file appear in other nodes, so, NFS work fine. If not, contact your admin (or if you are the admin, please troubleshoot NFS) so, they can troubleshoot the NFS.

2. SGE test
note to self : please put some test for SGE

3. MPICH test