5.3 Installation of Condor on Windows NT

    This section contains the instructions for installing the Microsoft Windows NT version of Condor (Condor NT) at your site. The install program will set you up with a slightly customized configuration file that you can further customize after the installation has completed.

Please read the copyright and disclaimer information in section  on page  of the manual, or in the file LICENSE.TXT, before proceeding. Installation and use of Condor is acknowledgement that you have read and agreed to these terms.

The Condor NT executable for distribution is packaged in a single file such as:

  condor-6.1.8_preview-WINNT40-x86.exe

  This file is approximately 5 Mbytes in size, and may be removed once Condor is fully installed.

Before installing Condor, please consider joining the condor-world mailing list. Traffic on this list is kept to an absolute minimum. It is only used to announce new releases of Condor. To subscribe, send an email to majordomo@cs.wisc.edu with the body:

   subscribe condor-world

5.3.1 Installation Requirements

• Condor NT requires Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 or above. Service Pack 5 is recommended. NOTE: Condor NT has not yet been tested with Windows 2000.

• 30 megabytes of free disk space is recommended. Significantly more disk space could be desired to be able to run jobs with large data files.

• Condor NT will operate on either an NTFS or FAT filesystem. However, for security purposes, NTFS is preferred.

  
5.3.2 Preparing to Install Condor under Windows NT

  Before you install the Windows NT version of Condor at your site, there are two major decisions to make about the basic layout of your pool.

1.

What machine will be the central manager?

2.

Do I have enough disk space for Condor?

If you feel that you already know the answers to these questions, skip to the Windows NT Installation Procedure section below, section 5.3.3 on page . If you are unsure, read on.

5.3.2.1 What machine will be the central manager?

One machine in your pool must be the central manager. This is the centralized information repository for the Condor pool and is also the machine that matches available machines with waiting jobs. If the central manager machine crashes, any currently active matches in the system will keep running, but no new matches will be made. Moreover, most Condor tools will stop working. Because of the importance of this machine for the proper functioning of Condor, we recommend you install it on a machine that is likely to stay up all the time, or at the very least, one that will be rebooted quickly if it does crash. Also, because all the services will send updates (by default every 5 minutes) to this machine, it is advisable to consider network traffic and your network layout when choosing the central manager.

For Personal Condor, your machine will act as your central manager.

Install Condor on the central manager before installing on the other machines within the pool.

5.3.2.2 Do I have enough disk space for Condor?

  The Condor release directory takes up a fair amount of space. The size requirement for the release directory is approximately 20 Mbytes.

Condor itself, however, needs space to store all of your jobs, and their input files. If you will be submitting large amounts of jobs, you should consider installing Condor on a volume with a large amount of free space.

  
5.3.3 Installation Procedure using the included Setup Program

Installation of Condor must be done by a user with administrator privileges. After installation, the Condor services will be run under the local system account. When Condor is running a user job, however, it will run that User job with normal user permissions. Condor will dynamically create an account, and then delete that account when the job is finished or is removed from the machine.

Download Condor, and start the installation process by running the file (or by double clicking on the file). The Condor installation is completed by answering questions and choosing options within the following steps.

If Condor is already installed.

For upgrade purposes, you may be running the installation of Condor after it has been previously installed. In this case, a dialog box will appear before the installation of Condor proceeds. The question asks if you wish to preserve your current Condor configuration files. Answer yes or no, as appropriate. If you answer yes, your configuration files will not be changed, and you will proceed to the point where the new binaries will be installed.

If you answer no, then there will be a second question that asks if you want to use answers given during the previous installation as default answers.

STEP 1: License Agreement.

The first step in installing Condor is a welcome screen and license agreement. You are reminded that it is best to run the installation when no other Windows programs are running. If you need to close other Windows NT programs, it is safe to cancel the installation and close them. You are asked to agree to the license. Answer yes or no. If you should disagree with the License, the installation will not continue.

After agreeing to the license terms, the next Window is where fill in your name and company information, or use the defaults as given.

STEP 2: Condor Pool Configuration.

The Condor NT installation will require different information depending on whether the installer will be creating a new pool, or joining an existing one.

If you are creating a new pool, the installation program requires that this machine is the central manager. For the creation of a new Condor pool, you will be asked some basic information about your new pool:

Name of the pool

hostname

of this machine.

Size of pool

Condor needs to know if this a Personal Condor installation, or if there will be more than one machine in the pool.     A Personal Condor pool implies that there is only one machine in the pool. For Personal Condor, several of the following steps are omitted as noted.

If you are joining an existing pool, all the installation program requires is the hostname of the central manager for your pool.

STEP 3: This Machine's Roles.

This step is omitted for the installation of Personal Condor.

Each machine within a Condor pool may either submit jobs or execute submitted jobs, or both submit and execute jobs. This step allows the installation on this machine to choose if the machine will only submit jobs, only execute submitted jobs, or both. The common case is both, so the default is both.

STEP 4: Where will Condor be installed?

  The next step is where the destination of the Condor files will be decided. It is recommended that Condor be installed in the location shown as the default in the dialog box: C: $\mathtt{\backslash}$Condor.

Installation on the local disk is chosen for several reasons.

The Condor services run as local system, and within Microsoft Windows NT, local system has no network privileges. Therefore, for Condor to operate, Condor should be installed on a local hard drive as opposed to a network drive (file server).

The second reason for installation on the local disk is that the Windows NT usage of drive letters has implications for where Condor is placed. The drive letter used must be not change, even when different users are logged in. Local drive letters do not change under normal operation of Windows NT.

While it is strongly discouraged, it may be possible to place Condor on a hard drive that is not local, if a dependency is added to the service control manager such that Condor starts after the required file services are available.

STEP 5: Where should Condor send e-mail if things go wrong?

Various parts of Condor will send e-mail to a Condor administrator if something goes wrong and requires human attention. You specify the e-mail address and the SMTP relay host of this administrator. Please pay close attention to this email since it will indicate problems in your Condor pool.

STEP 6: The domain.

This step is omitted for the installation of Personal Condor.

Enter the machine's accounting (or UID) domain. On this version of Condor for Windows NT, this setting only used for User priorities (see section 3.5 on page ) and to form a default email address for the user.

STEP 7: Access permissions.

This step is omitted for the installation of Personal Condor.

Machines within the Condor pool will need various types of access permission. The three categories of permission are read, write, and administrator. Enter the machines to be given access permissions.

Read

Read access allows a machine to obtain information about Condor such as the status of machines in the pool and the job queues. All machines in the pool should be given read access. In addition, giving read access to *.cs.wisc.edu will allow the Condor team to obtain information about your Condor pool in the event that debugging is needed.

Write

All machines in the pool should be given write access. It allows the machines you specify to send information to your local Condor daemons, for example, to start a Condor Job. Note that for a machine to join the Condor pool, it must have both read and write access to all of the machines in the pool.

Administrator

A machine with administrator access will be allowed more extended permission to to things such as change other user's priorities, modify the job queue, turn Condor services on and off, and restart Condor. The central manager should be given administrator access and is the default listed. This setting is granted to the entire machine, so care should be taken not to make this too open.

For more details on these access permissions, and others that can be manually changed in your condor_config file, please see the section titled Security Access Levels at section section  on page .

STEP 8: Job Start Policy.

Condor will execute submitted jobs on machines based on a preference given at installation. Three options are given, and the first is most commonly used by Condor pools. This specification may be changed or refined in the machine ClassAd requirements attribute.

The three choices:

After 15 minutes of no console activity and low CPU activity.

Always run Condor jobs.

After 15 minutes of no console activity.

  Console activity is the use of the mouse or keyboard. For instance, if you are reading this document online, and are using either the mouse or the keyboard to change your position, you are generating Console activity.

  Low CPU activity is defined as a load of less than 30% (and is configurable in your condor_config file). If you have a multiple processor machine, this is the average percentage of CPU activity for both processors.

For testing purposes, it is often helpful to use use the Always run Condor jobs option. For production mode, however, most people chose the After 15 minutes of no console activity and low CPU activity.

STEP 9: Job Vacate Policy.

This step is omitted if Condor jobs are always run as the option chosen in STEP 8.

If Condor is executing a job and the user returns, Condor will immediately suspend the job, and after five minutes Condor will decide what to do with the partially completed job. There are currently two options for the job.

The job is killed 5 minutes after your return.

The job is suspended immediately once there is console activity. If the console activity continues, then the job is vacated (killed) after 5 minutes. Since this version does not include check-pointing, the job will be restarted from the beginning at a later time. The job will be placed back into the queue.

Suspend job, leaving it in memory.

The job is suspended immediately. At a later time, when the console activity has stopped for ten minutes, the execution of Condor job will be resumed (the job will be unsuspended). The drawback to this option is that since the job will remain in memory, it will occupy swap space. In many instances, however, the amount of swap space that the job will occupy is small.

So which one do you choose? Killing a job is less intrusive on the workstation owner than leaving it in memory for a later time. A suspended job left in memory will require swap space, which could possibly be a scarce resource. Leaving a job in memory, however, has the benefit that accumulated run time is not lost for a partially completed job.

STEP 10: Review entered information.

Check that the entered information is correctly entered. You have the option to return to previous dialog boxes to fix entries.

  
5.3.4 Manual Installation Condor on Windows NT

  If you are to install Condor on many different machines, you may wish to use some other mechanism to install Condor NT on additional machines rather than running the Setup program described above on each machine.

WARNING: This is for advanced users only! All others should use the Setup program described above.

Here is a brief overview of how to install Condor NT manually without using the provided GUI-based setup program:

The Service

The service that Condor NT will install is called "Condor". The Startup Type is Automatic. The service should log on as System Account, but do not enable "Allow Service to Interact with Desktop". The program that is run is condor_master.exe.

For your convenience, we have included a file called install.exe in the bin directory that will install a service. It is typically called in the following way:

install Condor Condor c:\condor\bin\condor_master.exe

If you wish to remove the service, we have provided a file called remove.exe. To use it, call it in the following way:

remove Condor

The Registry

Condor NT uses a few registry entries in its operation. The key that Condor uses is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Condor. The values that Condor puts in this registry key serve two purposes.

1.

The values of CONDOR_CONFIG and RELEASE_DIR are used for Condor to start its service.

CONDOR_CONFIG should point to the condor_config file. In this version of Condor NT, it must reside on the local disk.

RELEASE_DIR should point to the directory where Condor is installed. This is typically C: $\mathtt{\backslash}$Condor, and again, this must reside on the local disk.

2.

The other purpose is storing the entries from the last installation so that they can be used for the next one.

The Filesystem

The files that are needed for Condor to operate are identical to the Unix version of Condor, except that executable files end in .exe. For example the on Unix one of the files is condor_master and on Condor NT the corresponding file is condor_master.exe.

These files currently must reside on the local disk for a variety of reasons. Advanced Windows NT users might be able to put the files on remote resources. The main concern is twofold. First, the files must be there when the service is started. Second, the files must always be in the same spot (including drive letter), no matter who is logged into the machine. Specifying a UNC path is not supported at this time.

 

   
5.3.5 Condor is installed... now what?

After the installation of Condor is completed, the Condor service must be started. If you used the GUI-based setup program to install Condor, the Condor service should already be started. If you installed manually, Condor must be started by hand, or you can simply reboot. NOTE: The Condor service will start automatically whenever you reboot your machine.

To start condor by hand:

1.

From the Start menu, choose Settings.

2.

From the Settings menu, choose Control Panel.

3.

From the Control Panel, choose Services.

4.

From Services, choose Condor, and Start.

Or, alternatively you can enter the following command from a command prompt:

         net start condor

 

  Run the Task Manager (Control-Shift-Escape) to check that Condor services are running. The following tasks should be running:

• condor_master.exe
• condor_negotiator.exe, if this machine is a central manager.
• condor_collector.exe, if this machine is a central manager.
• condor_startd.exe, if you indicated that this Condor node should start jobs
• condor_schedd.exe, if you indicated that this Condor node should submit jobs to the Condor pool.

Also, you should now be able to open up a new cmd (DOS prompt) window, and the Condor bin directory should be in your path, so you can issue the normal Condor commands, such as condor_q and condor_status.

   

  
5.3.6 Condor is running... now what?

Once Condor services are running, try building and submitting some test jobs. See the README.TXT file in the examples directory for details.