Setting up a working collective to distribute commands to multiple AIX nodes

In a partitioned database environment on AIX®, you can set up a working collective to distribute commands to the set of System p SP workstations that participate in your partitioned database system. Commands can be distributed to the workstations by the dsh command.

Before you begin

This can be useful when installing or administrating a partitioned database system on AIX, to enable you to quickly execute the same commands on all the computers in your environment with less opportunity for error.

You must know the host name of each computer that you want to include in the working collective.

You must be logged on to the Control workstation as a user with root user authority.

You must have a file that lists the host names for all of the workstations that will participate in your partitioned database system.

Procedure

To set up the working collective to distribute commands to a list of workstations:

Create a file called nodelist.txt that will list the host names for all of the workstations that will participate in the working collective.
For example, assume that you wanted to create a working collective with two workstations called workstation1 and workstation2. The contents of nodelist.txt would be:
```
workstation1
workstation2
```
Update the working collective environment variable.
To update this list, enter the following command:
```
export DSH_NODE_LIST=path/nodelist.txt
```
where path is the location where nodelist.txt was created, and nodelist.txt is the name of the file that you created that lists the workstations in the working collective.
Verify that the names in the working collective are indeed the workstations that you want, by entering the following command:
```
dsh -q
```
You will receive output similar to the following:
```
Working collective file /nodelist.txt:
workstation1
workstation2
Fanout: 64
```