Chapter 3. Resource Providing Hosts

Resource providing hosts provide computational resources like CPU cycles, memory, or disk space to clients. Resource owners must prepare their hosts by installing and configuring an auctioneer on each providing host.

If you have not already done so, follow the directions in the Tycoon User's Manual to create a Tycoon bank account. This will be the account owns the providing hosts. Funds earned by the hosts will be deposited in the owner account.

3.1. Installing and Configuring an Auctioneer

This section describes how to administer an auctioneer, which controls local resource allocation on a host.

  1. Prepare for configuring the auctioneer's owner by copying the host's owner's "~/.tycoon" directory to root's home directory (usually "/root"). The owner must have already created a Tycoon bank account as described in the Tycoon User's Manual tutorial up to step 4. For example, alice would do:

    [root@alicehost ~]# cp -a /home/alice/.tycoon /root
    

  2. Use yum to download and install the Tycoon auctioneer RPMs. This will also download and install a virtualization system, if one is not already installed on the system. By default, Tycoon uses the Xen hypervisor. Run the following command for Redhat Enterprise Linux derived distributions (including Scientific Linux and CentOS):

    [root@alicehost ~]# yum -y -c http://tycoon.hpl.hp.com/~tycoon/dl/yum/tycoon_el.repo install tycoon_aucd_xen3
    

    For Fedora Core, use the following:

    [root@alicehost ~]# yum -y -c http://tycoon.hpl.hp.com/~tycoon/dl/yum/tycoon_f.repo install tycoon_aucd_xen3
    

    Some older distributions require downloading the repo file separately:

    [root@alicehost ~]# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
    [root@alicehost ~]# wget http://tycoon.hpl.hp.com/~tycoon/dl/yum/tycoon_el.repo
    [root@alicehost ~]# yum -y install tycoon_aucd_xen3
    

    This outputs the following (the version numbers will vary):

    
    Setting up Install Process
    Setting up Repos
    .
    .
    .
    Installed: tycoon_aucd_xen3.noarch 0:0.3.0p27-1
    Dependency Updated: KL.noarch 0:0.3.0p8-1 tycoon.noarch 0:0.3.0p27-1
    Complete!
    
    

    The installation process also configures 1) grub to boot the Xen kernel, 2) the auctioneer to be started automatically when the machine is booted, 3) the auctioneer log file to be periodically rotated, 4) the owner to receive credits earned by the host, and 5) the quota system to control disk usage.

    The most likely problem in this step is that the grub configuration cannot be automatically modified by the auctioneer installation scripts. See Section 3.2, “Troubleshooting Installation”.

  3. Reboot the host to activate the Xen kernel:

    [root@providinghost0 ~]# shutdown -r now
    

  4. Verify that the Xen kernel is running:

    [root@providinghost0 ~]# uname -a
    

    This outputs:

    
    Linux providinghost0.hpl.hp.com 2.6.12.6-xen3_7.1_fc4 #1 SMP Tue Dec 13 16:33:43 PST 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux