From Grid-Appliance Wiki

Contents 1 GroupAppliances 2 HowTo 2.1 Create a Group 2.2 Join a Group 2.3 Setting up a GroupAppliance

GroupAppliances

Much like the idea of GroupVPN, GroupAppliances allow users that have IPOP installed in an Appliance, whether virtual or hosted, to be automatically configured to join a specific GroupVPN group and Condor group. Users familiar with Archer have already experienced the initial implementation of GroupAppliances. GroupVPN and Group Appliances serve two distinct and complementary purposes:

• The GroupVPN defines a group of machines that are connected by a VPN such that all traffic within this group of machines is authenticated and encrypted, thus isolated from other nodes outside the group. For example, in the context of Archer Global, a GroupVPN connects all resources belonging to the main Archer pool, as well as resources connected by registered Archer Global users.
• Group Appliances define a group of users/resources that belong to the same organization such that users within the organization have higher priority than external users. For example, in the context of Archer Global, a user belonging to a research lab "Mylab" can create a GroupAppliance group for their research team and deploy a cluster of appliances connected to Archer Global configured as "Mylab" resources. Then, users authorized to join the "Mylab" group can deploy appliances that will have higher priority on "Mylab" resources than other users.

HowTo

Use of GroupAppliances requires familiarity with GroupVPN. Not only does a GroupAppliance require a pre-existing GroupVPN, it reuses much of the same code, so the functionality is very similar. Once you are familiar with the GroupVPN continue with this.

Create a Group

• Sign-in
• Select GroupAppliances from the User Menu
• Enter a Group name, description, the GroupVPN you'd like to use, and press the "Create Group" button

Join a Group

• Sign-in
• Select GroupAppliances from the User Menu
• Select Join on the Group you wish to join
• Once you've received an acceptance e-mail, you may return to the website to download configuration files (floppy images)

Setting up a GroupAppliance

• Sign-in
• Select GroupAppliances from the User Menu
• Enter your group site
• Select the type of image you'd like to create (only admins are allowed to create 'Servers')
• Download the zip file, extract the floppy.img, and move it into the appliance directory renaming it to fdb.img