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Management Scripts
In this section I intend to include scripts that I write to aid in the management of the cluster, as I think of them and write them. In some cases there will be at least two versions of the scripts because there can be differences between what is required to make something work if the cluster uses rsh or ssh as its means of moving processes around. At this point I anticipate that all of the scripts will be written in perl. While most, if not all, of these scripts could be written as shell scripts, perl does afford a substantial advantage in flexibility and extendability, and as the sample database application will be implemented largely in perl cgi scripts, it makes sense to stick to perl here as well, because these scripts will provide a handy introduction to perl for those unfamiliar with it and to programming in general for those without programming experience. It is my observation that a surprising number of people involved in system administration roles have virtually no experience in prrogramming. (I could easily turn that around and say that virtually no programmers/developers haved any experience with system administration. For some time I've found it astounding that system administrators are not routinely included as part of development teams, but that's a rant for another time.) In any event, I'll include discussion of the structure of these scripts, and the scripts are also extensively documented internally. It is not my intent that this should represent either an introduction to programming or an introduction to programming in perl, but rather an illustration of how I resolved certain issues with scripts written in perl. If you are experienced with programming and perl be warned that you are likely to find some of the following material rather basic. I'm not all that worried about that, it is intended to give those with little experience an insight into how programs work.
If you haven't yet read the short section on configuring perl, you would be well-advised to do so now, because modules will have to be installed on the cluster controller for these scripts to run.
Scripts to Update Cluster Configuration Files