Lustre 1.6 Operations Manual

3.3 Environmental Requirements
When preparing to install Lustre, make sure the following environmental
requirements are met.
3.3.1 SSH Access
Although not strictly required, in many cases it is helpful to have remote SSH 1
access to all nodes in a cluster. Some Lustre configuration and monitoring scripts
depend on SSH (or Pdsh 2 ) access, although these are not required to run Lustre.
3.3.2 Consistent Clocks
Lustre always uses the client clock for timestamps. If the machine clocks across the
cluster are not in sync, Lustre should not break. However, the unsynchronized clocks
in a cluster will always be a headache as it is very difficult to debug any multi-node
issue or correlate logs. For this reason, we recommend that you keep machine clocks
in sync as much as possible. The standard way to accomplish this is by using the
Network Time Protocol (NTP). All machines in your cluster should synchronize their
time from a local time server (or servers) at a suitable time interval. For more
information about NTP, see:
http://www.ntp.org/
3.3.3 Universal UID/GID
To maintain uniform file access permissions on all nodes in your cluster, use the
same user IDs (UID) and group IDs (GID) on all clients. Like most cluster usage,
Lustre uses a common UID/GID on all cluster nodes.
1. Secure SHell (SSH)
2. Parallel Distributed SHell (Pdsh)
3-6 Lustre 1.6 Operations Manual • September 2008