Controlling Warewulf

Warewulf’s command-line interface is based primarily around the wwctl command. This command has sub-commands for each major component of Warewulf’s functionality.

  • configure: configures the Warewulf server and its external services

  • node: manages nodes in the cluster

  • profiles: defines common sets of node configuration which can be applied to multiple nodes

  • image: configures (node) images

  • overlays: manages overlays

wwctl also provides additional helpers for interacting with cluster nodes over SSH and IPMI.

  • power: turns nodes on and off

  • ssh: provides basic parallel ssh functionality

All of these subcommands (and their respective sub-subcommands) have built-in help with either wwctl help or --help.

Hostlists

Many of the commands (e.g., wwctl node list support a “hostlist” syntax for referring to multiple nodes at once. Hostlist expressions support both ranges and comma-separated numerical lists.

For example:

  • node[1-2] expands to node1 node2

  • node[1,3] expands to node1 node3

  • node[1,5-6] expands to node1 node5 node6

Node status

During the whole provisioning process of your nodes, you can check their status through the following command :

# wwctl node status
NODENAME             STAGE                SENT                      LASTSEEN (s)
================================================================================
n1                   RUNTIME_OVERLAY      __RUNTIME__.img.gz        16

For each node, there are 4 different stages:

  • IPXE

  • KERNEL

  • SYSTEM_OVERLAY

  • RUNTIME_OVERLAY

You can use the wwctl node status to check communication between the Warewulf server (warewulfd) and the Warewulf client (wwclient).