Notes on containers¶
Support containers¶
These are available in dockerhub. There are two different flavors: Alpine and Ubuntu-based.
All Virtual Core containers are based on either alpine-supervisor-sshd or tiagoantao/ubuntu-supervisor-sshd. These have the following features:
- Processes are controlled by supervisord
- Includes a zabbix monitor
- A SSH deamon is installed * A authorized_key has to be supplied. Used for root access.
- The entry point is /sbin/server_run.sh. A file /sbin/prepare_magic.sh can be installed and will be called before supervisor (e.g. to use passed environment variables to setup stuff)
Todo
Discuss shared volumes and the need of consistent mount points
Todo
Talk about docker swarm
LDAP service¶
Both containers are based on Alpine Linux. This will probably change in the future as Alpine Linux is not a good solution for most other services.
ldap¶
Attention
The container exposes only the SSL port, but a non-SSL port is available inside the docker network.
PostgreSQL service and container¶
The PostgreSQL database is configured by default to authenticate via LDAP, but some databases are trusted to other hosts, these are normally related to other containers. For example the zabbix database is controlled by the user zabbix which is trusted to login from the host zabbix. Note a few things:
- This is a default behavior that you can change during the configuration stage
- All databases necessary by other containers are created along with access rights even for containers that are not going to be installed. Note that the database schemas should be created by the respective containers.
- Make sure you are happy with access rules, especially if you spread containers across multiple machines. In that case you have some tweaking to do.
Software container¶
Compute nodes¶
We provide support for clusters via SLURM. You can be in one of three situations:
- You already have a cluster infrastructure not based on SLURM. If that is your case we do not support this directly. But if your cluster is based on free software we would be most happy to try to support it, please do contact us!
- You already have a SLURM based configuration. In this case you will have to make a few changes to the configuration. The wizard will help you here.
- You have nothing installed. We will take care of setting up a complete SLURM solution.
User server¶
based on software container. It is also a SLURM head node (if desired).