Re: [Condor-users] Windows jobs behave deifferently under Condor

[Michael Jinks <mjinks@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 12:05:49PM -0500, Todd Tannenbaum wrote:
> At 11:57 PM 8/22/2006, Michael Jinks wrote:
> >On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 12:02:51PM +1000, Philip Crawford wrote:
> > >
> > > 1. Is SPSSWIN.EXE going to create a Window, even a minimised one? Condor
> > > won't allow an application to run which creates a GUI window.
> >
> >Yep, it does flash the SPSS worksheet on the screen briefly as it runs.
> >Guess that's our answer then.
> 
> Actually, Condor *will* run apps that create a GUI window.  You just 
> need to be certain that the application is batch-ready, i.e. that it 
> will not pop open a window and then sit and block for some 
> non-existent interactive user to click a button.

This one is.  Or so it seems; I made a point of running the job on the
command line and then sitting on my hands until the output file showed
up.

> [ you could use 
> Winbatch or a similar tool to help out here as well ... ].

Wasn't aware of Winbatch.  I wonder if our Winfolk are.

> Sometimes GUI apps are more sensitive to environment variables and 
> such then their non-GUI counterparts, so you may want to use 
> "getenv=TRUE" in your submit file.

Wasn't aware of getenv either.  Thanks for that.

> By default, Condor will setup a separate non-visible workstation and 
> desktop for GUI apps to use.  If
>    use_visible_desktop=true
> in condor_config, then Condor will let the job pop open a window on 
> the default visible (console) desktop.  This is almost certainly not 
> what you want esp for non-dedicated workstations, but can be very 
> handy for debugging a problem.

All of that matches my understanding as of about 24 hours ago.

> Something I sometimes do to debug a job running in Condor on Win32 is
>    a) change my executable in my submit file to be cmd.exe
>    b) change use_visible_desktop=true in my condor_config
> and then submit.  After a couple moments a command window pops up on 
> my screen with the same "environment" that Condor would use to run 
> the job, so I try running my job interactively from the prompt to see 
> if there are any obvious problems.

So... You can interact with it, then?  Because a bit ago when I ran the
notepad example that Greg posted, I got my Notepad window but I couldn't
do anything with it.  In the past when I've tried to run cmd.exe from a
submit file, it's popped up very briefly on the desktop and then
vanished again.  I'm not sure what my use_visual_desktop setting was at
that point though so it might be worth trying again.

Thanks,
-m