KA-DEPLOY(1)KA-DEPLOY(1)NAME
ka-deploy, ka-d-server, ka-d-client - send large amounts of data to
several machines
SYNOPSIS
ka-d-server -n NUMBER [-l] [-s SESSION] [-d DELAY] [-e COMMAND]
ka-d-client [-s SESSION | -h HOSTNAME] [-e COMMAND] [-g]
DESCRIPTION
Ka-deploy is a tool designed to send large amounts of data from one to
many machines using TCP trees, typically a regular chain. The typical
usage for ka-deploy is partition cloning.
The machine you want to send the data from must be running ka-d-server
and the machines you want to send the data to must run ka-d-client.
The server ka-d-server will listen on a TCP port and wait for a given
number of machines ( ka-d-client) to connect to him. Then the server
will coordinate the clients in the creation of a TCP tree or chain.
Once ready, the server will run its command and pipe its standard out‐
put into the tree. The clients will read data from the tree and pipe
them into the standard input of their command.
FINDING THE SERVER
When ka-d-client is run, it must contact a ka-d-server program. There
are two ways of telling the client how to find the server. The -h
option can be used to give the server hostname to the client. Another
way is to use sessions: give a same -s option to both the server and
the client, and the client will send UDP broadcast packets to locate
the server. Of course this works only if the client and server are
within the same subnet. A session name is merely a short string, such
as "foobar" or "helloworld".
NUMBER OF CLIENTS
The server must be given a -n option with the number of clients to wait
before the building of the tree/chain occurs. If for some reason (node
failure for instance) at some moment you don't want to wait for all the
clients, you can force the server to exit the 'wait mode'. To do this,
just run a ka-d-client with the -g option. This client will contact the
server, tell him to stop waiting, and will exit.
SERVER OPTIONS-l Be sure the server data buffer always has enough data for recov‐
ery if a node fails. For this, the last node of the chain will
report from time to time its position in the data flow to the
server. I'm not too sure but this can lead to a severe perfor‐
mance drop with many nodes (200+).
-a NUM Specify the 'arity' of the tree, the number of nodes under each
node in the tree. The default is 1, and the result is a chain,
instead of a tree.
-d NUM Normally the server will send an 'exit signal' to the clients
when they have all received the data. If this option is enabled,
the server will introduce a delay between the release of the
clients. This delay is the given number in tenths of second.
Note that you MUST use the -w option on the clients for this to
work. We use this option to smooth the load on our TFTP servers
for whole-cluster system installations.
CLIENT OPTIONS-w If this option is used, then the client will wait for an 'exit
signal' from the server before exiting. This option can be used
to synchronize a bit the clients before they exit. See the -d
option on the server.
Ka Tools Manual 17 December 2001 KA-DEPLOY(1)
