8.4 Stable Release Series 7.0

This is a stable release series of Condor. It is based on the 6.9 development series. All new features added or bugs fixed in the 6.9 series are available in the 7.0 series. As usual, only bug fixes (and potentially, ports to new platforms) will be provided in future 7.0.x releases. New features will be added in the 7.1.x development series.

The details of each version are described below.

Version 7.0.2

Release Notes:

• None.

New Features:

• None.

Configuration Variable Additions and Changes:

• None.

Bugs Fixed:

• condor_ history in a quill environment, when given the -constraint option, would ignore attributes from the vertical schema. This has been fixed.

• In unix, when started as root, the condor_ master now changes the effective user id back to root (instead of condor) when restarting itself (e.g. due to the command condor_ restart). This makes no difference unless you have wrapped the condor_ master with a script of some kind and this script expects to be run as root not only on initial startup but on restart as well.

• The dedicated scheduler would sometimes take two negotiation cycles to acquire all the machines it needed to run a job. This has been now fixed.

• condor_ dagman no longer prints "Argument added" and "Retry Abort Value" diagnostic messages at the default verbosity, to reduce the size of the dagman.out file and the startup time for very large DAGs.

• condor_ dagman now prints a few fatal parse errors at lower verbosity settings than it did previously.

• condor_ preen no longer deletes MyProxy password files in the Condor spool directory.

Known Bugs:

• None.

Additions and Changes to the Manual:

• None.

Version 7.0.1

Release Notes:

• Fixed a bug in Condor's authorization policy reader. The bug affects cases where the policy (ALLOW/DENY and HOSTALLOW/HOSTDENY settings) mixes host-based authorizations with authorizations that refer to the authenticated user name. In some cases, this bug would result in host-based settings not being applied to authenticated users.

New Features:

• Support for Backfill Jobs is now available on Windows platforms. For more information on this, please see section 3.12.9 on page .

• Condor has been ported to Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.0 running on the 32-bit x86 architecture and on the 64-bit x86_64 architecture.

• The command email_attributes in a job submit description file defines a set of job ClassAd attributes whose values should be included in the e-mail notification of job completion.

• The configuration variable CONDOR_VIEW_HOST may now contain a port number, and may refer to a condor_ collector daemon running on the same host as the condor_ collector that is forwarding ClassAds. It is also now possible to use the forwarded ClassAds for matchmaking purposes. For example, several condor_ collector daemons could forward ClassAds to a single aggregating condor_ collector daemon which a condor_ negotiator then uses as its source of information for matchmaking.

• condor_ configure and condor_ install now detect missing shared libraries (such as libstdc++.so.5 on Linux), and print messages and exit if missing libraries are detected. The new command line option -ignore-missing-libs causes it not to exit after the messages have been printed, and to proceed with the installation.

• Added a -force command line option to condor_ configure (and condor_ install) which will turn on -overwrite and -ignore-missing-libs.

• condor_ configure now writes simple sh and csh shell scripts which can be sourced by their respective shells to set the user's PATH and CONDOR_CONFIG environment variables. By default, these are created in the root of the Condor installation, but this can be changed via the -env-scripts-dir command line option. Also, the creation of these scripts can be disabled with the -no-env-scripts command line option.

Configuration Variable Additions and Changes:

• The new configuration variable STARTER_UPLOAD_SECONDS prevents a hang if the condor_ shadow delays a write for more than the specified time. The default is 300.

• The new configuration variable CKPT_PROBE specifies an internal to Condor executable which determines information about how a process is laid out in memory, in addition to other information. This executable is not yet available on Windows platforms.

• The new configuration variable CKPT_SERVER_CHECK_PARENT_INTERVAL sets an interval of time between checks by the checkpoint server to see if its parent, the condor_ master daemon, has gone away unexpectedly. The checkpoint server shuts itself down if this happens. The default interval for checking is 120 seconds. Setting this parameter to 0 disables the check.

Bugs Fixed:

• Upgrade from PCRE v5.0 to PCRE v7.6, due to security vulnerabilities found in PCRE v5.0.

• Fixed file descriptor leak in the condor_ schedd when using the SOAP interface.

• Fixed a bug that primarily affected pools with MaxJobRetirementTime (0 by default) set larger than REQUEST_CLAIM_TIMEOUT (30 minutes by default). Since 6.9.3, when the condor_ schedd timed out requesting a claim to a slot, the condor_ startd was not made aware of the canceled request. This resulted in some wasted time (up to ALIVE_INTERVAL) in which the condor_ startd would wait for a job to run.

• A problem with condor_ history in a Quill environment incorrectly interpreting the -name option has been fixed.

• A memory leak that prevented condor_ load_history from running with large history files has been fixed.

• A bug in condor_ history when running in a quill environment has been fixed. This bug would cause the command to crash in some situations.

• The job ClassAd attribute EmailAttributes now works for grid universe jobs.

• On 32-bit Linux platforms, the job queue database file may now exceed 2GB. Previously, the condor_ schedd would halt with an error when trying to write past the 2GB mark.

• On 32-bit Linux platforms, condor_ history can now read from history files larger than 2GB except when using the -backwards option.

• Local universe jobs are now scheduled to run more promptly. Previously, new local universe jobs would sometimes take up to SCHEDD_INTERVAL (default 5 minutes) to be considered for running.

• The memory usage of the condor_ collector used to grow over time if daemons with new names kept joining and then leaving the pool (for example, in a Glidein pool). This was due to statistics on dropped updates that accumulated for all daemons that ever advertised themselves to the condor_ collector. These statistics are now periodically purged of information about daemons which have not reported in a long time. How long is controlled by COLLECTOR_STATS_SWEEP , which defaults to 2 days.

• Condor daemons would die when trying to send ClassAd advertisements to a host name that could not be resolved by DNS.

• Since 6.9.5, file transfer errors for vanilla, java, or parallel jobs would sometimes not result in the job going on hold as it should. This was most likely for very small files that failed to be written for some reason.

• The ImageSize reported for jobs on AIX was too big by a factor of 1024.

• Since 6.9.5, condor_ glidein failed in the set up stage, due to the change in syntax of quoting rules in the Condor submit description file for gt2 argument strings.

• Fixed a bug in the condor_ gridmanager that could prevent refreshed X509 proxies from being forwarded to the remote machine for grid universe jobs of type gt4.

• Fixed a bug in Condor's authorization policy reader. The bug affects cases where the policy (ALLOW/DENY and HOSTALLOW/HOSTDENY settings) mixes host-based authorizations with authorizations that refer to the authenticated user name. In some cases, this bug would result in host-based settings not being applied to authenticated users.

• Fixed a bug in condor_ history which causes a crash when condor_ quill is enabled.

• Fixed a problem affecting the GSI and SSL authentication methods. When these methods successfully authenticated the user but failed to find a mapping of the X509 name to a condor user id, they were setting the authenticated name to gsi and ssl respectively. However, these names contain no domain, so they could not be referred to in the authorization policy. Now these anonymous mappings are gsi@unmappeduser and ssl@unmappeduser. Therefore, configuration to deny access by users who are not explicitly mapped in the map file appears as:

  DENY_READ = *@unmappeduser
  DENY_WRITE = *@unmappeduser
  

Known Bugs:

• When using condor_ compile with the RHEL5 x86 port of Condor to produce a standard universe executable, one will see a warning message about how linking with dynamic libraries is not portable. This warning is erroneous and should be ignored. It will be fixed in a future version of Condor.

Additions and Changes to the Manual:

• The existing configuration variables SYSTEM_PERIODIC_HOLD , SYSTEM_PERIODIC_RELEASE , and SYSTEM_PERIODIC_REMOVE have documented definitions. See section 3.3.11 for definitions.

Version 7.0.0

Release Notes:

• PVM support has been dropped.

• The time zone for the PostgreSQL 8.2 database used with Quill on Windows machines must be explicitly set to use an abbreviation. This Windows environment variable is TZ. Proper abbreviations for the value of this variable may be found within the PostgreSQL installation in a file, share/timezonesets/<continent>.txt, where <continent> is replaced by the continent of the desired time zone.

New Features:

• The Windows MSI installer now supports VM Universe.

• Eliminated the ``tarball in a tarball'' in our distribution. The contents of release.tar from the distribution tarball (for example, condor-6.9.6-linux-x86-centos45-dynamic.tar.gz) is now included in the distribution tarball.

• Updated condor_ configure to match the above change. The -install option now takes a directory path as its parameter, for example -install=/path/to/release. It previously took the path to the release.tar tarball.

• Added condor_ install, which is a symlink to condor_ configure. Invoking

      condor_install
  

  is identical to running

      condor_configure --install=.
  

• Added the option -prefix=dir to condor_ configure and condor_ install. This is an alias for -install-dir=dir.

• Added the option -backup option to condor_ configure and condor_ install. This option renames the target sbin directory, if the condor_ master daemon exits while in the target sbin directory. Previous versions of condor_ configure did this by default.

• Changed the default behavior of condor_ install to exit with a warning if the target sbin directory exists, the condor_ master daemon is in the sbin directory, and neither the -backup nor -overwrite options are specified. This prevents condor_ install from improperly moving an sbin directory out of the way. For example,

      condor_install --prefix=/usr
  

  will not move /usr/sbin out of the way unless the -backup option is also specified.

• Updated the usage summary of condor_ configure and condor_ install to be much more readable.

Configuration Variable Additions and Changes:

• The new configuration variable DEAD_COLLECTOR_MAX_AVOIDANCE_TIME defines the maximum time in seconds that a daemon will fail over from a primary condor_ collector to a secondary condor_ collector. See section 3.3.3 on page  for a complete definition.

Bugs Fixed:

• Fixed a memory leak in the condor_ procd daemon on Windows.

• Fixed a problem that could cause Condor daemons to crash if a failure occurred when communicating with the condor_ procd.

• Fixed a couple of problems that were preventing the condor_ startd from properly removing per-job directories when running with PrivSep.

• The condor_ startd will no longer fail to initialize, claiming the EXECUTE directory has improper permissions, when PrivSep is enabled.

• Lookups of ClassAd attribute CurrentTime are now case-insensitive, just like all other attributes.

• Fixed problems causing the following error message in the log file:

  ERROR: receiving new UDP message but found a short message still waiting to be closed (consumed=1). Closing it now.
  

• The existence of the executable given in the submit file is now enforced (when transferring the executable and not using VM universe).

• The copy of condor_ dagman that ships with Condor is now automatically added to the list of trusted programs in the Windows Firewall.

• Removed remove_kill_sig from the submission file generated by condor_ submit_dag on Windows.

• Fixed the algorithm in the condor_ negotiator daemon, which with large numbers of machine ClassAds (for example, 10,000) was causing long delays at the beginning of each negotiation cycle.

• Use of MAX_CONCURRENT_UPLOADS was resulting in a connection attempt from the condor_ shadow to the condor_ schedd with a fixed 10 second timeout, which is sometimes too small. This timeout has been increased to be the same as other connection timeouts between the condor_ shadow and the condor_ schedd, and it now respects SHADOW_TIMEOUT_MULTIPLIER, so it can be adjusted if necessary.

• Fixed a problem with MAX_CONCURRENT_UPLOADS and MAX_CONCURRENT_DOWNLOADS , which was sometimes allowing more than the configured number of concurrent transfers to happen.

• Fixed a bug in the condor_ schedd that could cause it to crash due to file descriptor exhaustion when trying to send messages to hundreds of condor_ startds simultaneously.

• Fixed a 6.9.4 bug in the condor_ startd that would cause it to crash when a BOINC backfill job exited.

• Since 6.9.4, when using glExec, configuring SLOTx_EXECUTE would cause condor_ starter to fail when starting the job.

• Fixed a bug from 6.9.5 which caused authentication failure for the pool password authentication method.

• Fixed a bug that caused Condor daemons to crash when encountering some types of invalid ClassAd expressions.

• Fixed a bug under Linux that could cause multi-process daemons lacking a log lock file to crash while rotating logs that have reached their maximum configured size.

• Fixed a bug under Windows that sometimes caused connection attempts between Condor daemons to fail with Windows error number 10056.

• Fixed a problem in which there are multiple condor_ collector daemons in a pool for fault tolerance. If the primary condor_ collector failed, the condor_ negotiator would fail over to the secondary condor_ collector indefinitely (or until the secondary condor_ collector also failed or the administrator ran condor_ reconfig). This was a problem for users flocking jobs to the pool, because flocking currently only works with the primary condor_ collector. Now, the condor_ negotiator will fail over for a restricted amount of time, up to DEAD_COLLECTOR_MAX_AVOIDANCE_TIME seconds. The default is one hour, but if querying the dead primary condor_ collector takes very little time to fail, the condor_ negotiator may retry more frequently in order to remain responsive to flocked users.

• Fixed a problem preventing the use of condor_ q -analyze with the -pool option.

• Fixed a problem in the condor_ negotiator in which machines go unassigned when user priorities result in the machines getting split into shares that are rounded down to 0. For example if there are 10 machines and 100 equal priority submitters, then each submitter was getting 0.1 machines, which got rounded down to 0, so no machines were assigned to anybody. The message in the condor_ negotiator log in this case was this:

  Over submitter resource limit (0) ... only consider startd ranks
  

• Fixed a problem introduced in 6.9.3 that would cause daemons to run out of file descriptors if they create sub-processes and are configured to use a lock file for the debug log.

• Standard universe jobs now work properly when using PrivSep.

• Fixed problem with PrivSep mode where a job that dumps core would not get the core file transferred back to the the submit host if the transfer_output_files submit option were used.

• Fixed a bug that caused the condor_ starter to crash if a job called condor_ chirp with the get_job_attr option.

Known Bugs:

• None.

Additions and Changes to the Manual:

• None.