Thanks for all the feedback. I will look at the tools you suggested when I have more time.
FYI, here is a bit more info on PLD rescue and boel4. In the end I managed to coerce the latter into doing what I wanted, but not the former. For PLD there is some funny issue in 2.96 and 2.97 where the network does not start during the normal boot (either by PXE or from CD), but once the console comes up typing: /etc/init.d/network start does bring up the network and sshd starts. After that I was able to connect via ssh (as root/pld). Strange. Of course my subnet is a little strange - there is no DNS server since all the machines just use hosts files. A 5 year old version of PLD works as desired when booted from a CD. However, that one is old enough that it might have problems recognizing modern hardware. For boel4 it struck me as really odd that sshd wouldn't work, so I poked and finally found all the problems. There were a couple of issues: 1. no dns server on subnet. Solution, be sure the dynamic IP address was included in the .../scripts/hosts file. The sshd doesn't really need to know its name, but the rcS script in boel4 insists on looking one up - if the IP number isn't found either in hosts or dns it aborts before ever getting to the user supplied script. 2. sshd_config was set PermitEmptyPasswords no PasswordAuthentication no (Note, PLD has a root password, but boel doesn't. I may have said it was the other way around in my first post.) 3. the sshd start function from /etc/init.d/functions would not not start. It is expecting things to be different than they are for this application. So, to fix 2 and 3 I took out the key pieces of the sshd start script and stuffed them into a minimal user boel script, placed right after the normal section which says: echo "Load additional filesystem drivers." modprobe reiserfs modprobe ext2 modprobe ext3 modprobe jfs modprobe xfs ############################################################## ssh-keygen -t dsa -N "" -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "" -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key mkdir -p /dev/pts mount -t devpts none /dev/pts mkdir -p /var/empty cat >/etc/ssh/sshd_config <<EOD Port 22 Protocol 2 HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key KeyRegenerationInterval 3600 ServerKeyBits 768 SyslogFacility AUTH LogLevel INFO LoginGraceTime 600 PermitRootLogin yes StrictModes yes RSAAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys IgnoreRhosts yes RhostsRSAAuthentication no HostbasedAuthentication no PermitEmptyPasswords yes PasswordAuthentication yes X11Forwarding no X11DisplayOffset 10 PrintMotd no KeepAlive yes Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/sftp-server EOD /usr/sbin/sshd shellout ############################################################## Now when the remote system PXE boots, with the default pxe configuration set for boel4, and with the node assigned name "temp98.cluster" (or whatever other number it gets), and with the script above called "temp.master", the node comes up with sshd running, and one may connect with: ssh 192.168.1.98 from root, without providing a password. The only remaining complication, and it is a minor one, is that since the remote system has a new set of keys each time it boots, on the client one must delete the previous key or it won't connect because it thinks it sees a man in the middle attack. Regards, David Mathog mat...@caltech.edu Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
