Create Users Plugin

This plugin creates one or more cluster users and configures passwordless SSH access between cluster nodes for each user.

Configuration

To use the users plugin add a [plugin] section to your starcluster config file:

[plugin createusers]
setup_class = starcluster.plugins.users.CreateUsers
num_users = 30

The above config will create and configure 30 cluster users along with passwordless SSH access on the cluster for each user. In this case usernames are auto-generated to be user001, user002, etc. If you’d prefer to provide the usernames instead of auto-generating them use the following config instead:

[plugin createusers]
setup_class = starcluster.plugins.users.CreateUsers
usernames = linus, tux, larry

Next update the PLUGINS setting of one or more of your cluster templates to include the createusers plugin:

[cluster mycluster]
plugins = createusers

The next time you start a cluster using the mycluster template the plugin will automatically be executed and users will be created. If you need to download the SSH keys for each cluster user in order to distribute them to users that do not have access to your AWS account please read the next subsection.

Downloading User SSH Keys

Warning

These settings will download the SSH keys for each user to your local computer. Please be aware that these keys allow remote access to your cluster(s). Please use caution when storing and distributing these keys.

If you’d prefer the plugin to automatically archive and download the SSH keys for each cluster user add the following to your [plugin] section:

[plugin createusers]
setup_class = starcluster.plugins.users.CreateUsers
num_users = 30
download_keys = True

By default this will create and download an archive containing all users’ SSH keys to $HOME/.starcluster/user_keys/<cluster>-<region>.tar.gz. If you’d prefer to store the archive in an alternate location specify the download_keys_dir setting:

[plugin createusers]
setup_class = starcluster.plugins.users.CreateUsers
num_users = 30
download_keys = True
download_keys_dir = /path/to/keys/dir/

The above example will download the SSH keys archive to /path/to/keys/dir/<cluster>-<region>.tar.gz.

Usage

Once the plugin has been configured it will automatically run the next time you start a new cluster using the appropriate cluster template. If you already have a cluster running that didn’t originally have the plugin in its plugin list at creation time you will need to manually run the plugin:

% starcluster runplugin createusers mycluster
StarCluster - (http://star.mit.edu/cluster)
Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR)
Please submit bug reports to starcluster@mit.edu

>>> Running plugin createusers
>>> Creating 30 cluster users
3/3 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 100%
>>> Configuring passwordless ssh for 30 cluster users
50/50 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 100%
>>> Configuring scratch space for user(s): user001, user002,
>>> user003, user004, user005, user006, user007, user008,
>>> user009, user010, user011, user012, user013, user014,
>>> user015, user016, user017, user018, user019, user020,
>>> user021, user022, user023, user024, user025, user026,
>>> user027, user028, user029, user030
3/3 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 100%

After the plugin has finished executing you can easily login to the cluster as any one of these users on any node in the cluster:

% starcluster sshmaster -u user007 mycluster
% starcluster sshnode -u user007 mycluster node007

Using the SSH Keys Archive

Warning

Please use caution when storing and distributing these keys - they allow remote access to your cluster.

If you specified download_keys = True in your config then the plugin will create and download a gzipped tar archive containing the RSA SSH keys for each user to your local computer:

>>> Tarring all SSH keys for cluster users...
>>> Copying cluster users SSH keys to: mycluster-us-east-1.tar.gz
mycluster-us-east-1.tar.gz 100% ||||||||||||||||||| Time: 00:00:00 963.07 K/s

If you did not specify download_keys_dir in your config then the tar archive will be saved to $HOME/.starcluster/user_keys/<cluster>-<region>.tar.gz by default. The archive contains all of the RSA SSH keys for each cluster user it created:

% cd $HOME/.starcluster/user_keys
% tar -tf mycluster-us-east-1.tar.gz
./user001.rsa
./user002.rsa
./user003.rsa
./user004.rsa
./user005.rsa
./user006.rsa
./user007.rsa
./user008.rsa
./user009.rsa
./user010.rsa
./user011.rsa
./user012.rsa
./user013.rsa
./user014.rsa
./user015.rsa
...

These keys can be distributed to non-AWS users to allow remote cluster access without AWS credentials. You will also need to pick a cluster node for users to login to and then distribute that node’s public DNS name to your non-AWS users. You can use the listclusters command to list the public DNS names of all nodes in your cluster:

$ starcluster listclusters mycluster
StarCluster - (http://star.mit.edu/cluster)
Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR)
Please submit bug reports to starcluster@mit.edu

---------------------------------------------------
mycluster (security group: @sc-mycluster)
---------------------------------------------------
Launch time: 2010-02-19T20:55:20.000Z
Uptime: 00:29:42
Zone: us-east-1c
Keypair: mykeypair
Cluster nodes:
     master running i-99999999 ec2-123-123-123-121.compute-1.amazonaws.com
    node001 running i-88888888 ec2-123-123-123-122.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Total nodes: 2

As an example, let’s choose the master node in the above output to be the ‘login’ node. Now suppose we distribute user007’s username and SSH key to a non-AWS user and also give them the public DNS name of the login node. In this case the non-AWS user can connect to the cluster’s master node as user007 using:

% ssh -i /path/to/user007.rsa user007@ec2-123-123-123-121.compute-1.amazonaws.com