wulfware

by Robert G. Brown Duke University Physics Department Durham, NC 27708-0305 Copyright Robert G. Brown, 2025

This is the official website for the Wulfware suite of LAN or cluster monitoring tools. These tools all build from a single source rpm, or alternatively one can build them from the source tarball.

This project has a mailing list here. This is a (currently) very low traffic list devoted to bug reports, development announcements, feature requests and little else.

• xmlsysd -- a daemon that runs on the client to be monitored that provides client statistics on demand via an xinetd or forking daemon socket. The information is wrapped in XML tags that can be parsed or presented on the client side in a variety of ways.
• libwulf -- a library of functions that support configuring a cluster or LAN for monitoring (using an XML-based cluster description file), managing connections to the cluster nodes or LAN clients automatically, configuring the connections to return minimal information for the quantities being monitored or displayed, and then polling the hosts and extracting their information into a struct for further processing by a user interface (UI) program linked to the library.
• wulflogger -- a very simple raw-tty (stdout) UI that is suitable for extracting cluster/lan statistics from any of several useful clusters of data. This data can be piped into a file or other applications for post-processing, removing the burden from a programmer of writing an automated UI for managing the connections themselves. Alternatively, it can be used as a template for further UIs.
• wulfstat -- an ncurses-based (cooked tty) UI that presents LAN or cluster stats in a scrollable display within e.g. an xterm window.
• wulf2html -- a perl filter that runs behind wulflogger and transforms wulflogger output into a formatted html page that can then be viewed from any browser. wulf2html can be started from chkconfig as a service on a webserver or host that mounts webspace after editing /etc/warewulf/wulf2html.sh and /etc/warewulf/wulfhosts to reflect the cluster or LAN to be monitored. This is still a bit experimental.
• wulfware-doc -- a future latex/pdf documentation set for all of the above, which alas doesn't exist yet. The man pages do exist, and are installed for each package within the package.
• gwulfstat -- a future or planned piece of vaporware that will someday come to fruition -- a nice, fully featured GUI based on Gtk/Gnome for monitoring a cluster or LAN. Since it doesn't exist I can be lavish with features such as a "panel of lights" display that lets you see the state of a huge cluster at a glance on a high-res display, settable alarms and an alarm messaging system, a remote shell interface that lets you select blocks of nodes or clients by means of a mouse or hostname glob and then run shell commands on all the selected clients at one time, an integrated batch job scheduler with the ability to implement SIMPLE policy schemes, and eating your meatloaf for you. With catsup. Seriously, all of that and more is possible, it just needs the work.
• wulfwebd -- a future or planned aggregator daemon. This is a daemon that is basically a stripped wulflogger on one side -- goes and connects to an entire cluster and manages all connections for you. It polls the connected clients, collects their raw xmlsysd results, and spits them out on a SINGLE port offered on the daemon side. This daemon (will) exists only to make it possible to drill a hole through a firewall to a single host and retrieve all the information on a cluster or LAN inside. Or, alternatively, within multiple VPNs across IP domain boundaries and so on if you want to do this securely. So you can sit in Boston and monitor your departmental LAN and your research cluster all at the same time right through firewalls in between from a single e.g. wulfstat or gwulfstat session. This will require changes to the libwulf API to support an aggregated connection, probably to a different default port number or connection type via an extension of the cluster defining xml.

Submit bug reports, etc. to