The main machine as the entrance had to be configured. I put in jed and emacs20 with apt-get to make it usable, and did apt-get install mpich. I edited the configuration file of MPICH to add individual machine names of the cluster.
For executables to be shared, MPICH uses NFS, so NFS has to be installed in the "Sparcgate" master.
/home of Sparcgate master has been exported using nfs-server package. Actually this involved adding /home kecs*.hiroyasu.com(rw) to /etc/exports, and ran /etc/init.d/nfs-server restart to make it take effect.
Since MPICH uses rsh to execute, each node must have rsh installed
rsh is in the netstd package, which was not installed. Thus, I did an apt-get install netstd to every machine.
To install the nfs directory, I added to each machine's /etc/fstab a line 192.168.1.1:/home /home nfs defaults and did mount -a for this to take effect.
I have added to the file ~/.rhosts a line 192.168.1.1[10] so that 192.168.1.1 can do commands with rsh.
Now the machines are set up, mpich is already functional. I copied /usr/lib/mpich/examples to ~. Then did mpirun -np 17 cpi etc. It went all fine. I was satisfied. However, at this point, the NIS is not set up, so adding a user involves doing adduser on every machine. [11]