There is an easy way and a hard way to get the various services configured and started. We will focus on the easy way using a free third party download called Xgridlite. You can download it from this site or directly here. Although free, the author accepts PayPal donations. Since the software is so useful, you may wish to use this service.

Xgridlite is a preference pane plugin that provides the most useful Xgrid functions of setting up the controller and passwords.

A useful feature is the Reset button, which can sets things straight when they go awry - as oft they will with Xgrid.

Because activities are happening on remote computers and it is very difficult to determine what is going on and debugging, another extremely useful utility is the Xgrid Sample application that comes with the free Developer Tools for OS X. The current application can be downloaded here from some Xgrid resources at geekmeetsgirl.net, though if you have the tools it is best to compile this yourself.

Getting Started

It is a good idea to choose a password for the agents. This is for security because any person on the network will be able to execute commands on any of the Xgrid agent computers without password protection.

Note that as of this time VisualHub's Xgrid implementation requires that you disable passwords. Do so at your own risk.

Let's assume you have added in password ABC to each computer's Xgrid configuration as above.

Now you need to set the controller so that it knows these passwords. using Xgridlite in the preference pane, click "Provide password to agents" and set the password to be the same - ABC.

You should also set a password for the controller. I set mine to be the same as the agents for simplicity.


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sudo rm -rf /var/xgrid/agent/* /var/xgrid/controller/*