Accessing the Grid

AppLogic supports the following types of access to the grid:

GUI Access

To access your grid, point your browser to your grid's dashboard: http://gridname.3tera.net. The gridname is most likely your company's name. You will be prompted for your user name and password. Upon success, there will be a "license agreement" page displayed after the login (only on first login for each user), followed by the grid's dashboard page.

Grid Dashboard

The grid dashboard contains a lot of important information and state about your grid.

Grid Status
Shows the current status of your grid, the number of physical servers and number of applications running on the grid. The Refresh button updates this information.

Message Board
Shows important messages from the AppLogic service (core grid) -- regarding the core grid and your grid. To refresh this information, refresh the page in your browser.

Grid Info
Shows configuration information about your grid: IP address of the grid controller, number and type of servers, as well as the list of IP addresses that you can use in applications running on the grid. Other network settings, such as the netmask, gateway address and dns servers are either listed there or in the message board.

Access the visual interface

The visual interface gives you access to the applications and appliances installed on the grid.

To access the AppLogic visual interface, click on the Editor tab from the grid dashboard page. You should see the list of installed applications on your grid.

Regular User Access

Grid users are provided access through the AppLogic GUI. Gaining access to the GUI is described above. To access the grid, you need to log into the GUI and click on the Shell Login button located on the Grid Dashboard page.

Once within the AppLogic Shell, you can type help for a list of available commands or see the Shell Reference here.

Volume Access

Volumes are made accessible through scp and sftp.

Note that an authorized ssh key must be set up for the user to use the scp or sftp access to volumes. See the User Management Commands for details on authorizing an ssh key. When using scp or sftp access, configure the client program to use the private key that corresponds to the key set up with the user create or user set command and specify root as the username to scp or sftp (e.g., use root@controllerhost as the target name).

The following commands are supported:

scp localfile controllerhost:/vol/appname/volname/filepath

copy localfile to an application volume. Same with swapped 1st and 2nd args to copy from an application volume to a local file or directory. No additional command is needed to make the specified volume accessible.

scp -d localdir controllerhost:/_impex/

copy localdir to the controller's import/export area. Same with swapped 1st and 2nd args to copy from the controller to a local file or directory. This is normally used to copy data for the 'app import', 'class import', 'app export' and 'class export' commands

scp localfile controllerhost:/app/appname/compname/filepath

copy localfile to the filespace of a running appliance. Same with swapped 1st and 2nd args to copy from an appliance to a local file or directory.

sftp [options] controllerhost

open an interactive or batch sftp session. The session has access to all volumes to which access is requested beforehand, via the 'vol mount' command sent to the 3t shell. The client sees a filesystem that contains only the 'mounted' volumes as '/appname/volname/ - the same as for the 'scp' command (except no vol root). All SFTP commands are allowed, including chown, chmod, etc., for manipulating file permissions and ownership on the volumes.

nautilus sftp://controllerhost/

This or any similar GUI-based SFTP client can be used to access volumes (pre-mounted with a shell command or via the Web GUI). The semantics and the level of access are exactly the same as for the command-line SFTP (barring any functionality restrictions imposed by the GUI app).

Appliance Access

User's have access to running application appliances through ssh and scp.

To gain access to an applicance via ssh, log into the AppLogic Shell and execute

ssh appname:componentname

You will be provided with root access to the appliance. Once in the appliance you may execute scp to transfer the required files to the appliance.

Scripting Access

See Scripting CLI Commands Reference for information regarding how to script AppLogic Shell Commands.

For those who use GNU bash: Client-side Macros - an alternative way to access the AppLogic shell commands directly from your local command prompt.