TakTuk

kanif is a tool for cluster management and administration. It combines main features of well known cluster management tools such as c3, pdsh and dsh and mimics their syntax. For the effective cluster management it relies on TakTuk, a tool for large scale remote execution deployment.

For simple parallel tasks that have to be executed on regular machines such as clusters, TakTuk syntax is too complicated. The goal of kanif is to provide an easier and familiar syntax to cluster administrators while still taking advantage of TakTuk characteristics and features (adaptivity, scalability, portability, autopropagation and informations redirection).

To work, kanif needs to find the "taktuk" command in the user path (kanif 1.1 and above requires TakTuk version 3.3 and above). The other requirements are the same as TakTuk: it requires, on all the nodes of the cluster, a working Perl interpreter (version 5.8 and above) and a command to log without password (such as "ssh" with proper rsa keys installed).

kanif provides three simple commands for clusters administration and management:

• kash: runs the same command on multiple nodes
• kaput: broadcasts the copy of files or directories to several nodes
• kaget: gathers several remote files or directories

kanif combines the advantages of several cluster management tools. Its main features can be summarized as follows:

• C3-style configuration file for static clusters setups
• pdsh-like options such as nodes ranges and timeouts
• dshbak-like gathering, sorting and merging of output

kanif also reports a quick summary of failures: connections and commands execution.

Thanks to Lucas Nussbaum, kanif is part of the unstable branch of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. I strongly acknowledge him for his help regarding kanif testing and packaging.

Thus, if you have included the unstable branch to your apt configuration, the following command should be sufficient to install kanif:

apt-get install kanif

For those who do not use the Debian GNU/Linus operating system, here are kanif stable releases tarballs:

• kanif-1.2.2.tar.gz
• kanif-1.2.1.tar.gz
• kanif-1.2.tar.gz
• kanif-1.1.tar.gz
• kanif-1.0.2.tar.gz
• kanif-1.0.1.tar.gz
• kanif-1.0.tar.gz

You can also have a quick look at known bugs for these releases and at the ChangeLog file that report briefly the evolution with each new release. kanif bleeding edge development snapshots are also downloadable at the "Files" section of the project resources center.