8.3 Stable Release Series 6.8

This is a stable release series of Condor. It is based on the 6.7 development series. All new features added or bugs fixed in the 6.7 series are available in the 6.8 series. As usual, only bug fixes (and potentially, ports to new platforms) will be provided in future 6.8.x releases. New features will be added in the forthcoming 6.9.x development series.

The 6.8.x series supports a different set of platforms than 6.6.x. Please see the updated table of available platforms in section 1.5 on page .

The details of each version are described below.

Version 6.8.0

Release Notes:

• The default configuration for Condor now requires that HOSTALLOW_WRITE be explicitly set. Condor will refuse to start if the default configuration is used unmodified. Existing installations should not need to change anything. For those who desire the earlier default, you can set it to "*", but note that this is potentially a security hole allowing anyone to submit jobs or machines to your pool.

• Most Linux distributions are now supported using dynamically linked binaries built on a RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 machine. Recent security patches to a number of Linux distributions have rendered the binaries built on RedHat 9 machines ineffective. The download pages have been changed to reflect this, but Linux users should be aware of this change. The recommended download for most x86 Linux users is now: condor-6.8.0-linux-x86-rhel3-dynamic.tar.gz.

• Some log messages have been clarified or moved to different debugging levels. For example, certain messages that looked like errors were printed to D_ALWAYS, even though nothing was wrong and the system was behaving as expected.

• The new features and bugs fixed in the rest of this section only refer to changes made since the 6.7.20 release, not the last stable release (6.6.11). For a complete list of changes since 6.6.11, read the 6.7 version history in section 8.4 on page .

New Features:

• Version 1.4 of the Condor DRMAA libraries are now included with the Condor release. For more information about DRMAA, see section 4.4.2 on page .

• Version 1.0.15 of the Condor GAHP is now used for Condor-G and Condor-C.

• Added the -outfile_dir command-line argument to condor_ submit_dag. This allows you to change the directory in which condor_ dagman writes the dagman.out file.

• Added a new -summary (also -s) option to the condor_ update_stats tool. If enabled, this prevents it from displaying the entire history for each machine and only displays the summary info.

Bugs Fixed:

• Fixed a number of potential static buffer overflows in various Condor daemons and libraries.

• Fixed some small memory leaks in the condor_ startd, condor_ schedd, and a potential leak that effected all Condor daemons.

• Fixed a bug in Quill which caused it to crash when certain long attributes appeared in a job ad.

• The startd would crash after a reconfig if the address of a collector had not been resolved since the previous reconfig (e.g. because DNS was down during that time).

• Once a Condor daemon failed to lookup the IP address of the collector (e.g. because DNS was down), it would fail to contact the collector from that time until the next reconfig. Now, each time Condor tries to contact the collector, it generates a fresh DNS query if the previous attempt failed.

• When using Condor-C or the -s or -r command-line options to condor_ submit, the job's standard output and error would be placed in the job's initial working directory, even if the job ad said to place them in a different directory.

• Greatly sped up the parsing of large DAGs (by a factor of 50 or so) by using a hash table instead of linear search to find DAG nodes.

• Fixed a bug in condor_ dagman that caused an EXECUTABLE_ERROR event from a node job to abort the DAG instead of just marking the relevant node as failed.

• Fixed a bug in condor_ collector that caused it to discard machine ads that don't have an IP address field (either StartdIpAddr or STARTD_IP_ADDR). The condor_ startd will always produce a StartdIpAddr field, but machine ads published through condor_ advertise may not.

• When using BIND_ALL_INTERFACES on a dual-homed machine, a bug introduced in 6.7.18 was causing Condor daemons to sometimes incorrectly report their IP addresses, which could cause jobs to fail to start running.

• Made the event checking in condor_ dagman less strict: added the new "allow duplicate events" value to the DAGMAN_ALLOW_EVENTS macro (this value is part of the default); 16 value now also allows terminate event before submit; changed "allow all events" to "allow almost all events" (all except "run after terminal event"), so it is more useful.

• condor_ dagman and condor_ submit_dag now report -NoEventChecks as ignored rather than deprecated.

• Fixed a bug in the condor_ dagman -maxidle feature: a shadow exception event now puts the corresponding job into the idle state in condor_ dagman's internal count.

• Fixed a problem on Windows where daemons would sometimes crash when dealing with UNC path names.

• Fixed a problem where the condor_ schedd on Windows would incorrectly reject a job if the client provided an Owner attribute that was correct but differed in case from the authenticated name.

• Fixed a condor_ startd crash introduced in version 6.7.20. This crash would appear if an execute machine was matched for preemption but then not claimed in time by the appropriate condor_ schedd.

• Resolved an issue where the condor_ startd was unable to clean up jobs' execute directories on Windows when the condor_ master was started from the command line rather than as a service.

• Added more patches to Condor's DRMAA interface to make it more compatible with Sun Grid Engine's DRMAA interface.

• Removed the unused D_UPDOWN debug level and added the D_CONFIG debug level.

• Fixed a bug that caused condor_ q with the -l or -xml arguments to print out duplicate attributes when using Quill.

• Fixed a bug that prevented Condor-C jobs (universe grid jobs of type condor) from submitting correctly if QUEUE_ALL_USERS_TRUSTED is set to True.

• Fixed a bug that could cause the condor_ negotiator to crash if the pool contains several different versions of the condor_ schedd and in the config file NEGOTIATOR_MATCHLIST_CACHING is set to True.

• Changed the default value for config file entry NEGOTIATOR_MATCHLIST_CACHING from False to True. When set to True, this will instruct the negotiator to safely cache data in order to improve matchmaking performance.

• The Condormaster now recognizes condor_ quill as a valid Condor daemon without any manual configuration on the part of site administrators. This simplifies the configuration changes required to enable Quill.

• Fixed a rare bug in the condor_ starter where if there was a failure transferring job output files back to the submitting host, it could hang indefinitely, and the job appeared as if it was continuing to run.

Known Bugs:

• There are known scalability problems when using Condor's Kerberos authentication mechanism in large pools. If your installation of Condor is more than a couple dozen machines, and you need to use Kerberos for Condor authentication, we recommend you wait for Condor version 6.8.1 or use Condor version 6.7.17 (which does not suffer from these problems).

• There are known problems with Condor's SSL authentication mechanism. While the HTTPS support in Condor (which also uses SSL) works fine for the SOAP/Birdbath interface, there are bugs with the SSL support when SSL is listed in SEC_DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_METHODS. We expect to fix these issues for version 6.8.1.

• The -completedsince option to condor_ history works when Quill is enabled. The behavior of condor_ history -completedsince is undefined when Quill is not enabled.