[Bioclusters] notes on Platform LSF Webgui / Apache 2.x integration within a MacOSX/Linux hybrid cluster
Ron Chen
bioclusters@bioinformatics.org
Fri, 9 May 2003 20:33:44 -0700 (PDT)
PBSWeb is the web interface for PBS:
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/%7Epinchak/PBSWeb/
GridEngine has a few web interfaces:
http://gridengine.sunsource.net/project/gridengine/gep/GEP_Intro.html
http://www.veus.hr/linux/gemonitor.html
(and yet another one under development)
-Ron
--- Chris Dagdigian <dag@sonsorol.org> wrote:
>
> BioTeam gets asked all the time to explain concrete
> differences between
> the features and functionality one gets with Sun
> Grid Engine vs.
> Platform LSF.
>
> The answer is alway different as people have many
> reasons for asking
> that question. Some are deeply interested in the
> architectural
> differences, others are freaked out by how different
> 'queues' can be
> between LSF/PBS/GridEngine etc. and many just want
> to know "will the
> freely available SGE suit my needs or do I have to
> pay $$ to Platform
> for some LSF licenses?"
>
> I'm agnostic myself on the SGE vs LSF front and try
> to make sure that
> people are able use the best tool for the job. Of
> the 4 bioclusters that
> I'm currently working on or have just completed 50%
> are running Grid
> Engine and the other 50% are running Platform LSF.
> Different tools for
> different environments and production needs...
>
> On the whole "differences between SGE and LSF"
> front...
>
> One thing I noticed recently when working with LSF
> 5.1 is the new
> Java/Tomcat web GUI package that is distributed for
> 'free' along with
> LSF Standard. The tomcat appserver inside the webgui
> apparently talks
> via SOAP to LSF which in itself is potentially very
> interesting for
> people doing webservices stuff.
>
> I'm always way more productive at the commandline so
> this
> "lsf_5.1_webgui" package was something that I never
> really bothered to
> look at until I realized that this was one of the
> concrete examples of
> something one gets along with LSF that is certainly
> not included with
> Grid Engine. The existing SGE web tools one can find
> on the net are
> basic scripts that do little more than wrap the
> 'qstat' binary around a
> perl or php CGI. Sun may have wrapped SGE into their
> "SunOnePortal"
> appserver efforts but I've never seen it in action.
>
> With that in mind I decided to install the LSF
> webgui package onto a
> hybrid Apple/Linux cluster so I could take it for a
> spin. (pictures of
> the Apple/Dell hybrid cluster are now in the
> biocluster gallery at
> http://bioteam.net/gallery/album06)
>
> <break>
>
> Anyone who wants to see screen shots of the LSF Web
> GUI in action can
> stop reading and just point a browser to
> http://bioteam.net/gallery/album04
>
> Read on for notes on how to put Apache 2.0.x in
> front of the LSF web gui
>
> </break>
>
>
> The LSF webgui installs just like any other LSF
> add-on. You put the
> zipped up tarball into an installation directory and
> call the regular
> old LSF installer shell script. The process was
> straightforward and the
> archive was unpacked and automatically configured
> for use within the
> existing LSF cluster environment.
>
> The web GUI is started from the commandline:
>
> > $LSF_HOME/bin/gaadmin start|stop
>
> The first thing I realized is that the app was
> starting up on port 8080.
>
> The port can be changed by altering the port value
> found in:
> $LSF_HOME/tomcat/conf/server.xml but...
>
> This was not optimal as I did not want to deal with
> opening up another
> firewall port for HTTP traffic _and_ I already had a
> perfectly good
> SSL-enabled Apache 2.0.40 set up with all sorts of
> static and dynamic
> content at the usual port 80 location.
>
> What I wanted to do was 'embedd' the LSF GUI into
> the regular old
> cluster webserver which had already been set up with
> monitoring tools,
> documenation and all sorts of other things.
>
> A bit of google searching for "tomcat apache
> integration" shows that the
> standard way that people do this is to use the
> "webapp" Apache module
> which acts as a "connector" to tomcat application
> servers.
>
> After a bit of trial and error I was able to
> download and build
> mod_webapp from the Apache.org CVS server and get it
> cleanly loaded as a
> DSO into the Apache 2.0.40 server running on the
> cluster.
>
> Once that was done; it looked as the config would be
> trivial. All I
> should have had to do was put something like this
> into my httpd.conf file:
>
> <IfModule blah blah blah...>
> WebAppConnection warpConnection warp
> localhost:8008
> WebAppDeploy examples warpConnection /examples/
> WebAppDeploy Platform warpConnection /Platform/
> WebAppInfo /webapp-info
> </IfModule>
>
> Problem was, I could not do that
>
> The Apache 2.0.4 server kept thinking that the
> webapp configuration
> directives were virtual host directives and kept
> complaining about
> "syntax error in virtual host name" etc. etc.
>
> Google searches seemed to indicate that others have
> had problems with
> apache thinking that webapp commands were vhost
> commands so at this
> point I gave up on mod_webapp and moved on to
> working with mod_proxy
> which I have had better experiences with in the
> past.
>
> All the other tomcat/apache integration websites
> seemed to be based on
> the use of the Apache-1.x series so no luck there.
>
> I blew away the mod_webapp stuff and made sure that
> mod_proxy was
> available to me. Then I put these lines into
> httpd.conf:
>
> ## Test proxy for LSF web gui
> ProxyPass /tomcat http://localhost:8080
> ProxyPassReverse /tomcat http://localhost:8080
>
> A restart of the webserver and things started
> working!
>
> I was able to get to the tomcat start page by
> pointing a browser at
> /tomcat/index.html
>
> Next step was to try getting the LSF web interface
> loaded by pointing my
> browser at /tomcat/Platform/
>
> Aargh!
>
> I can obviously talk to the LSF interface but the
> HTML is all screwed
> up. The appserver spits back HTML with relative
> inline links that point
> to /Platform/ which result in a screen full of 404
> not found errors.
>
> My first thought was to use mod_rewrite within
> Apache to fix this but I
> ended up going for the quick and dirty fix. My
> httpd.conf file now has
> these lines in it:
>
> ## Test proxy for LSF web gui
> ProxyPass /tomcat http://localhost:8080
> ProxyPassReverse /tomcat http://localhost:8080
> ProxyPass /Platform
> http://localhost:8080/Platform
>
=== message truncated ===
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