Re: [Condor-users] Multiple windows machine management?

["Michael McClenahan" <michael.mcclenahan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We decided to go the other route and put everything locally on the
windows boxes as we didnt want the machines trying to read network
shares every time the condor service started/reconfigured. I wrote my
own condor installer that does everything the main one does but also
sets up a config dir and shares it out with write access for a certain
user. It also shares out various other dirs for read access (such as
log/execute). It also copies a very bare bones config on to the machine
so that it will show up in the condor pool.

A scheduled task runs a perl script that parses the output of various
condor_status -format queries and feeds info about what machines are
running what versions of various config files into a sql database and
then alerts us if certain machines are running outdated config files and
can also alert us about any machines that have dissapeared from the
pool.  condor_status -format is your friend.

Once a machine is showing up in the pool, we then have a centralised web
page with a simple sql backend where you can control what machine should
get which config files and run this service as a user who has write
perms on the config shares. This service can then push out the relevant
config files to the box and issue a reconfig (or a restart of the condor
service if needed). It can also compare what config files it *THINKS* a
box should have vs what config files condor is reporting it as running
and alert when these are different.

We found this worked very well as is easily extended for other
functionality, such as tagging boxes to no longer accept any new jobs,
setting them to alert us when they have finished running their current
jobs (so we can perform maintenance on the box), automatically
installing software updates/windows patches once they are free of jobs
etc.

This is used to manage both our execute nodes as well as all the
workstations/submit boxes and means that any member of our helpdesk team
can manage the condor pool with very little knowledge of how condor
actually works.

This is for a windows only pool.


Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: condor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:condor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ian Chesal
Sent: 16 January 2008 19:20
To: Condor-Users Mail List
Subject: Re: [Condor-users] Multiple windows machine management?

> Do you also share the condor binary, to make upgrade to  a new version
easy?

For Linux and Solaris the binaries are run out of an NFS share but on
Windows we keep local copies of the binaries on the box. The upgrade
process we use for Windows shuts down Condor on a machine and then
pushes new binaries to the box remotely through the \\hostname\C$ UNC
path using an account that's set up as an administrator account on the
machine. And then starts Condor back up.

My experience is that running software off CIFS or SMB shares never
scales.

- Ian


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