Re: [Condor-users] Question regarding running windows condor pool

[Matt Hope <matthew.hope@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 13:19:35 -0500, Prakash Velayutham
<prakash.velayutham@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have a question regarding windows condor pool. I have around 20
> windows PCs sitting idle (most of the time). Some are W2K and some Win
> XP SP2. These machines are clients of a Samba3 PDC. How will condor
> start jobs on these machines (under what user)? and does it mean that
> remote desktop or some similar software needs to be installed on these
> machines? As far as I know, user switching does not work in these
> machines as they are part of a domain, and what happens in this case
> with condor running a job and a user trying to physically logon to the box?
> Sorry for the basic questions here, I work mostly on Linux.

The user your jobs run as is not a member of any domain, therefore it
has access to not resources obtained through domain membership.

Essentially you have all the CPU and memory on the machine and that's
it (if it's SMP it's up to you to behave rather than launching many
processes/threads).

The samba domain controller will essentially be unused from the
execute machine point of view.

What happens when a user logs onto the box is up to the configuration
on the box (I assume under your control)

This however will behave exactly as it does on Unix with the exception
that you should not just assume that users should make their jobs
checkpoint so you can just kick them off since on windows this is not
so easy, you may wish to experiment with suspending jobs for a while
rather than just vacating them.

For windows specifics take a look at 

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/manual/v6.7/6_2Microsoft_Windows.html

And perhaps take a look at the archives for several threads from Ian
Chesal and myself talking about various aspects of the windows
implementation and how to go about trading off security for wider
domain access (also in the manual search for 'net use'). (there are
some other posts concerning the possibility of using the domain
controller and making the temporary users part of the domain - but I
would advise against bothering with doing that unless you have no
other option)

Matt