[Condor-users] First look at Condor on Vista

["Ian Chesal" <ICHESAL@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Finally got two Vista nodes set up in my pool. Those Apple ads you've
seen...with the "allow/deny" body guard. Every bit the truth I'm afraid.
I had to suffer through a whole lot of "Allow...?" questions from XP and
in the end some manual setup was required. Specifically I had to set the
Condor registry settings by hand.

I haven't run jobs through them yet but I thought I'd let the community
see how Vista machines represent themselves in the pool. I'm using
Windows Vista Business Edition. And I've installed the 32-bit version on
an older Intel-based Dell server and the 64-bit version on a new
AMD-based Sun server.

The machines show up in the collector. Although running 'condor_status
-direct localhost' on the machines always fails. I suspect some weird
Vista user process-to-system process security annoyance is at play here.

First look shows:

% condor_status -const 'Opsys == "WINNT60"'

Name          OpSys       Arch   State      Activity   LoadAv Mem
ActvtyTime

vm1@TTC-BS100 WINNT60     INTEL  Unclaimed  Idle       0.000  1268
0+16:47:57
vm2@TTC-BS100 WINNT60     INTEL  Unclaimed  Idle       0.010   777
0+00:46:09
vm1@ttc-bs220 WINNT60     INTEL  Unclaimed  Idle       0.000  2499
0+00:18:05
vm2@ttc-bs220 WINNT60     INTEL  Unclaimed  Idle       0.000  2499
0+00:18:06
vm3@ttc-bs220 WINNT60     INTEL  Unclaimed  Idle       0.000  1531
0+00:18:07
vm4@ttc-bs220 WINNT60     INTEL  Unclaimed  Idle       0.040  1531
0+00:18:08

                     Machines Owner Claimed Unclaimed Matched Preempting

       INTEL/WINNT60        6     0       0         6       0          0

               Total        6     0       0         6       0          0

One thing I noticed from the above output is from an Arch/OpSys
perspective both these machines look the same. I can't tell the
difference between the 32-bit and the 64-bit machine. The processors are
both showing INTEL, which I believe is a Condor-on-Windows limitation.
And they both call Vista "WINNT60". With XP you could tell 32-bit XP
from 64-bit XP using the OpSys field: 32-bit XP == WINNT51 and 64-bit XP
== WINNT52. I've been thinking for some time now that I was going to
have to implement a custom Arch/OpSys alternative in my pool to tell the
difference between specific versions of Linux and processors and with
not being able to distinguish between 32-bit or 64-bit Vista with
Arch/OpSys it looks like I'm going to have to sit down and work this out
once and for all.

I'm not hopeful jobs will run easily on these machines.

- Ian

--
Ian R. Chesal <ichesal@xxxxxxxxxx>
Senior Software Engineer

Altera Corporation
Toronto Technology Center
Tel: (416) 926-8300