Re: [Condor-users] Start process in specific session/window station on terminal server

["John (TJ) Knoeller" <johnkn@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Something like this has been on or list of would-like-to-have a a while 
now;   So a patch
to add this capability would be welcome.

I believe that this can be done without major changes to the condor 
code, but I don't
fully understand the implications of creating new sessions right now.   
A patch would
be required to preserve isolation between different users running jobs 
at the same
time, and it would have to degrade gracefully when run on Windows XP or on
non-server versions of Windows.

If you would like to discuss contributing a patch for this, please 
contact me
at johnkn@xxxxxxxxxxxx

-tj


On 9/18/2011 7:41 AM, Felix Wolfheimer wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm using Condor to start jobs on Windows 2008 R2 Terminal Servers. Some
> of the programs started by Condor have graphical user interfaces which
> allow the user to see the progress of the work the program performs. As
> it is absolutely essential that a user can see this user interface when
> the job runs I configured Condor to use the "visible desktop" such that
> the GUI opens in session 0 of the execution machine.
>
> However, I'm not really satisfied with this for several reasons:
>
> 1. In Windows Server 2008 R2 session 0 is non interactive. Although I
> can allow the Condor service to interact with the visible desktop the
> GUI is still invisible and you get it only after clicking on a special
> dialog ("A service wants to show a message"). Not very nice.
>
> 2. All instances of the programs started by Condor are shown on the same
> desktop. So each user can see the output of all running jobs. Also not
> very nice.
>
> This is what I would like to have:
>
> When a job starts on one of the Windows 2008 R2 terminal servers Condor
> should perform the following actions:
>
> 1. Logon the user on the machine and load the users profile, e.g. full
> registry hive and network shares, such that the software sees actually
> the same environment as if the user logs in interactively.
>
> 2. For this logon a new session should be created for the user and the
> program window should open on the interactive window station (winsta0)
> of this new session.
>
> 3. In order to allow the user to see the program window from his own
> machine I want to use RDP, i.e. the user should be able to establish an
> RDP connection to the terminal server session in which the program
> window is shown.
>
> I know that this is possible in principle as the "Load Sharing
> Facility" (LSF) resource management system does it this way. When you
> start a program under control of LSF it creates a new session to which a
> user can connect to watch his job using a tool called "tspeek" (which
> uses the RDP protocol).
>
> I would like to ask you (probably someone actively developing the
> Windows port of Condor) whether you think that this is possible with
> reasonably small changes to the condor_startd. I'm willing to do those
> changes and to contribute them back to the project if there is any
> interest.
>
> Thanks!
>
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