Remote shell command

GPFS commands need to be able to communicate across all nodes in the cluster. To achieve this, the GPFS commands use the remote shell command that you specify on the mmcrcluster command or the mmchcluster command.

The default remote shell command is ssh. You can designate the use of a different remote shell command by specifying its fully qualified path name on the mmcrcluster command or the mmchcluster command. The remote shell command must adhere to the same syntax as ssh, but it can implement an alternate authentication mechanism.

Clusters that include both UNIX and Windows nodes must use ssh for the remote shell command. For more information, see Installing and configuring OpenSSH on Windows nodes.

Clusters that only include Windows nodes may use the mmwinrsh utility that comes with GPFS. The fully qualified path name is /usr/lpp/mmfs/bin/mmwinrsh. For more information about configuring Windows GPFS clusters, see mmwinservctl command.

By default, you can issue GPFS administration commands from any node in the cluster. Optionally, you can choose a subset of the nodes that are capable of running administrative commands. In either case, the nodes that you plan to use for administering GPFS must be able to run remote shell commands on any other node in the cluster as user root without the use of a password and without producing any extraneous messages. You can also use sudo wrappers for this purpose.

For additional information, see Requirements for administering a GPFS file system.