[HTCondor-users] Condor calling home to condor.cs.wisc.edu

[Brian Candler <b.candler@xxxxxxxxx>]

Testing on a standalone VM (Ubuntu 14.04) which has condor-8.0.7 installed from deb package.

Debugging a DNS issue, I happened to discover that when condor was starting up, tcpdump showed it doing queries for "condor.cs.wisc.edu". However the default config has all these things commented out:

$ sudo grep -iR condor.cs.wisc.edu /etc
/etc/condor/condor_config:#FLOCK_TO = central_manager.friendly.domain, condor.cs.wisc.edu
/etc/condor/condor_config:#FLOCK_NEGOTIATOR_HOSTS = condor.cs.wisc.edu, condor-negotiator.friendly.domain
/etc/condor/condor_config:#FLOCK_COLLECTOR_HOSTS =Â condor.cs.wisc.edu, condor-collector.friendly.domain
/etc/condor/condor_config:#CONDOR_DEVELOPERS_COLLECTOR = condor.cs.wisc.edu

Now: if I set CONDOR_DEVELOPERS_COLLECTOR = foo.bar, then I see the queries for foo.bar instead. But if I set it to the empty string, it starts querying condor.cs.wisc.edu again.

Implication: an out-of-the-box personal condor installation automatically "calls home" to condor.cs.wisc.edu

I also see commented out:

## Address to which Condor will send a weekly e-mail with output of
## condor_status.
#CONDOR_DEVELOPERS = condor-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx

So by extension, does that mean that Condor mails out information about itself? Checking mail logs on another machine:

Oct 23 00:01:38 proliant postfix/smtp[26418]: E8F21217FB: to=<condor-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx>, relay=granite.cs.wisc.edu[128.105.6.24]:25, delay=3, delays=0.15/0.03/2.6/0.19, dsn=5.1.8, status=bounced (host granite.cs.wisc.edu[128.105.6.24] said: 553 5.1.8 <condor@proliant>... Domain of sender address condor@proliant does not exist (in reply to MAIL FROM command))

Yes, it looks like it does. In this case it was only stopped because that particular machine doesn't have a FQDN.

I find this surprising and concerning. I did not opt in to sending information about my systems to the University of Wisconsin, and the configuration does not make it clear that if you leave these things commented out (which they are), the default behaviour is to do them anyway.

Now that I know to search for "CONDOR_DEVELOPERS_COLLECTOR" I found
http://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/privacy.html
which explains that this does indeed happen, and says:
"you are free to disable it at any time by changing the configuration variables CONDOR_DEVELOPERS and CONDOR_DEVELOPERS_COLLECTOR, both described in section 3.3.15 of the user's manual"

without saying exactly what you need to do, without a hyperlink, and with the wrong section number.

Eventually I found it in section 3.3.16 of the manual:
http://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/manual/current/3_3Configuration.html#Collector-Config-File-Entries

This explains that you can set CONDOR_DEVELOPERS_COLLECTOR and CONDOR_DEVELOPERS to NONE to disable this behavior.

Debugging this was not a happy experience, so I'm just reporting it here in case it helps others.

Regards,

Brian.