Installation Walkthrough and Notes for Condor

DISCLAIMER: Any information you read on this page is a lie. Actually, it isn't but you should treat it as such. These are my personal notes so YMMV! I do not want to be held responsible for your destruction of the world. Having said all of that, enjoy! :)

SPECIAL NOTE: If you're installing GlideinWMS, then the GlideinWMS installer will help you install Condor if you provide it the tarball.

STEP 1: Obtain, install, and update a Linux distribution

I used Scientific Linux 5.3 from: http://www.scientificlinux.org/

You can also use Redhat Enterprise 5.3 or CentOS 5.3. My installation was on two VMWare Workstation 6.5.3 virtual machines named SL#1 and SL#2. I selected that they would have 512 MiB? of RAM and up to 16 GiB? hard disks. To use Condor, there is no requirement to use a 64-bit system. You can use a 32-bit and all of the software will be compatible. The reverse is not necessarily true, but I have not confirmed this yet. It's also a good idea to update the system with the latest recommended patches and security updates before continuing any futher. I also reconfigured /etc/ssh/sshd_config to use a different port and adjusted the VM to acquire an IP address from my router in order to make my virtual machines accessible remotely through SSH. I had to change /etc/hosts to list the names of my systems as FQDNs, aliases, and their local IP addresses. Also, I had to edit /etc/resolv.conf to setup DNS after switching to a static IP in the GUI since it wasn't getting it from DHCP anymore.

STEP 2: Install Condor

Option 1: Install from Pre-compiled Binary / RPM

This is the typical way most users will work with Condor. It is the fastest and easiest way to get it up and running.

Use a web-browser to download the file "condor-7.3.2-linux-x86_64-rhel5-dynamic-unstripped.tar.gz" from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/downloads-v2/download.pl

Copy the RPM to the servers you wish to deploy it on.

Let's start installing it:

su - root
groupadd -g 5000 condor
useradd -c "Condor Daemon" -g 5000 -m -s /bin/bash -u 5000 condor

The user's home directory must be world readable.

chmod 744 /home/condor

We'll be installing as root since the documentation recommends this procedure. Now, move the tarball we downloaded into the condor directory.

mv condor-7.3.2-linux-x86_64-rhel5-dynamic-unstripped.tar.gz /home/condor
cd /home/condor

Since we got the tarball, we need to decompress it.

gunzip -c condor-7.3.2-linux-x86_64-rhel5-dynamic-unstripped.tar.gz | tar xvf -

[OPTIONAL & UNTESTED] If we got the RPM, the above command might look something like this instead:

rpm -ivh condor-7.3.2-linux-x86_64-rhel5-1.x86_64.rpm --prefix=/home/condor

Now, let's install Condor as the central manager since this is the first machine. We must run condor configure_ as root to install and set the file permissions correctly.

cd condor-7.3.2
./condor_install --verbose --prefix=/home/condor --local-dir=/home/condor/local --type=manager,execute --owner=condor

Ok, now that the Central Manager is installed, we should repeat the above installation on our other nodes which will run Condor. However, we modify the installation command slightly for execute and submit systems:

./condor_install --verbose --prefix=/home/condor --local-dir=/home/condor/local --type=submit,execute --owner=condor

If you wanted all three (not recommended for production or large systems), it might look something like this:

./condor_install --verbose --prefix=/home/condor --local-dir=/home/condor/local --type=manager,submit,execute --owner=condor

Just for good measure, make sure the owner is correct on all condor files:

chown -R condor:condor /home/condor

CONDOR IS NOW INSTALLED! Skip to the next section for configuration.

Option 2: Install from Source

WARNING! The instructions to install from source are not complete yet.

Since we're setting up a development system, we'll install the latest bleeding edge version which is currently 7.3.2. The installation manual for Condor 7.3.2 can be located here: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/manual/v7.3/3_2Installation.html

The condor manual asks some preparation questions. Here are my answers:

1. What machine will be the central manager? SL#1
2. What machines should be allowed to submit jobs? SL#1, SL#2
3. Will Condor run as root or not? Yes, since the installation documentation recommends it.
4. Who will be administering Condor on the machines in your pool? I will! 8D
5. Will you have a Unix user named condor and will its home directory be shared? Yes, but it will not be shared.
6. Where should the machine-specific directories for Condor go? They can live with the rest of the condor application inside the condor daemon's directory.
7. Where should the parts of the Condor system be installed? Inside the condor directory.
   • Configuration file: maybe in /condor/config
   • Release directory: maybe in /condor/release
     • user binaries: maybe in /condor/bin
     • system binaries: maybe in /condor/sbin
     • lib directory: maybe in /condor/lib
     • etc directory: maybe in /condor/etc
   • Documentation: maybe in /condor/doc
8. Am I using AFS? Nope
9. Do I have enough disk space for Condor? Yah, 50 MiB? right?

Ok, that's it for pre-installation questions. We'll be installing Condor on SL#1 first to setup the central information repository.

Let's start installing it:

su - root
groupadd -g 5000 condor
useradd -c "Condor Daemon" -g 5000 -m -s /bin/bash -u 5000 condor

The user's home directory must be world readable.

chmod 744 /home/condor
su - condor

Ok, the condor download site is a little goofy which prevents me from just using wget. Just download the src code tarball "condor_src-7.3.2-all-all.tar.gz" and move it into /home/condor/ on SL#1. You can do this however you want to. We're going to be compiling from source and not using a binary. This allows us greater flexibility for installation.

gunzip -c condor_src-7.3.2-all-all.tar.gz | tar xvf -
cd condor-7.3.2

Let's read the file README.building in this directory. It seems that we need some packages pre-installed. Luckily, SL 5.3 already has everything I need. I checked using yum list <package name> as the root user.

Ok, now let's start compiling.

cd src
./build_init

FAILURE. O M G. It was worth a try.

Required tools are present and valid, attempting to initialize build
configure.ac:2547: /usr/bin/m4: builtin `mkstemp' requested by frozen file is not supported
autom4te: /usr/bin/m4 failed with exit status: 1
autoheader: /usr/bin/autom4te failed with exit status: 1
Failed to initialize build, check errors and try again once fixed

Let's update m4 from source. Login as root again in another window.

wget ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/5x/SRPMS/SL/m4-1.4.8-1.src.rpm

rpm -ivh m4-1.4.8-1.src.rpm

rpmbuild -bb --rebuild /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/m4.spec

My installation is 64-bit, so install this:

rpm -ivhF /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/x86_64/m4-1.4.8-1.x86_64.rpm

The 32-bit equivalent would be:

rpm -ivhF /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/m4-1.4.8-1.i386.rpm

Let's try running the build initialization tool again:

./build_init

[condor@localhost src]$ ./build_init
Checking for version of autoheader >= 2.59...succeeded. (2.59)
Checking for version of autoconf >= 2.59...succeeded. (2.59)
Required tools are present and valid, attempting to initialize build
Build initialized, you can now run "./configure; make"

SUCCESS!!! Let's enable as many optional features as possible. NOTE: --prefix doesn't work yet.

./configure --enable-full-port --enable-soft-is-hard --enable-job-hooks --enable-hibernation --enable-ssh-to-job --with-buildid

make

make release

...TO BE CONTINUED

STEP 3: Configure Condor

Now that Condor is installed, it must be configured. At the end of the installation, this message is displayed:

In order for Condor to work properly you must set your CONDOR_CONFIG environment variable to point to your Condor configuration file:
/home/condor/etc/condor_config before running Condor commands/daemons. Created scripts which can be sourced by users to setup their
Condor environment variables. These are:
sh: /home/condor/condor.sh
csh: /home/condor/condor.csh

This means we need to update the environment variable CONDOR_CONFIG to be changed when you login as the condor user:

I just added this line to /home/condor/.bash_profile:

. ~/condor.sh

Let's login as the condor user:

su - condor

Now, we must manually edit the condor configuration file:

vi $CONDOR_CONFIG

So, according to this file, we must fill out Part 1 in order for condor to work. Here are my answers for the SL1 virtual machine:

LOCAL_DIR = /home/condor/local
CONDOR_ADMIN = me@mydomain.com
UID_DOMAIN = $(FULL_HOSTNAME)
FILESYSTEM_DOMAIN = $(FULL_HOSTNAME)
COLLECTOR_NAME = ChrisB? Pool

There is also a required field to edit in Part 2 despite the file stating that Part 2 is optional (oh well):

HOSTALLOW_WRITE = *.mydomain.com

Let's also edit the local configuration for each machine:

vi /home/condor/local/condor_config.local

Here are my changes:

CONDOR_ADMIN = me@mydomain.com

UID_DOMAIN = $(FULL_HOSTNAME)

FILESYSTEM_DOMAIN = $(FULL_HOSTNAME)

STEP 4: Start Condor

su - condor

condor_master