Condor Release

Version 6.7.18

Release Notes:

• A security team at UW-Madison is conducting an ongoing security audit of the Condor system and has identified a few important vulnerabilities. Condor versions 6.6.11 and 6.7.18 fix these security problems and other bugs. There have been no reported exploits, but all sites are urged to upgrade immediately.

  The Condor Team will publish detailed reports of these vulnerabilities on 2006-04-24, 4 weeks from the date when the fixes were first released (2006-03-27). This will allow all sites time to upgrade before enough information to exploit these bugs is widely available.

• The -flock option in condor_ cold_start and condor_ cold_stop has been replaced by -filelock to avoid any confusion between file locking and Condor job flocking.

• As of 6.7.17, Quill's database schema has been slightly altered. For more information, please see the corresponding 6.7.17 version history entry in section 8.3 on page .

Security Bugs Fixed:

• Bugs in previous versions of Condor could allow any user who can submit jobs on a machine to gain access to the ``condor'' account (or whatever non-privileged user the Condor daemons are running as). This bug can not be exploited remotely, only by users already logged onto a submit machine in the Condor pool.

• The security of the ``condor_ config_val -set'' feature was found to be insufficient, so this feature is now disabled by default. There are new configuration settings to enable this feature in a secure manner. Please read the descriptions of ENABLE_RUNTIME_CONFIG , ENABLE_PERSISTENT_CONFIG and PERSISTENT_CONFIG_DIR in the example configuration file shipped with the latest Condor releases, or in section 3.3.4 on page .

New Features:

• Added a new LOCAL_CONFIG_DIR configuration setting. This now allows entire directories of files to be included as though they were configuration files. See 3.3.2 for more info.

• You can now put extra information into the notification email. The information is a list of attributes, which you provide. For example, if your submit file has ``+EmailAttributes = "RemoteHost, Requirements"'', then RemoteHost and Requirements will be listed in the notification email.

• Added a new clipped port of Condor to HP-UX 11 running on the HP-PA architecture.

• Condor is now much better at recognizing when a grid-type gt2 grid universe job failure is unrecoverable and at cleaning up failed or canceled job submissions. This should reduce the number of jobs that perpetually return to held state when released.

• When job attribute GlobusResubmit evaluates to true for grid-type gt2 jobs, the condor_ gridmanager will try to cancel the existing job before starting the new submission. If the cancel attempt fails, the condor_ gridmanager will proceed with the new submission anyway.

• When BIND_ALL_INTERFACES is enabled, Condor daemons now advertise their IP address as that of the network interface used to contact the collector. This makes it possible, for example, to have a schedd on a multi-homed machine flock jobs to Condor pools in two separate networks, because the schedd can advertise a different IP address to the two collectors. condor_ cod also benefits in the case where the startd is reachable through a network interface other than the default one that would normally be advertised. This change also produces improved default behavior in cases such as condor_ glidein where the startd lands on a dual-homed machine with both public and private IP addresses.

• In condor_ dagman, the informational messages about hitting the -maxidle, -maxjobs, -maxpre, and -maxpost limits are no longer printed to the dagman.out file by default. To see these messages, add -debug 4 to the condor_ submit_dag command line. A summary of the total number of job and script deferrals is now printed by default each time the node status is printed and at the end of the dagman.out file. This can be turned off by setting the debug level to 2 or lower on the condor_ submit_dag command line.

• Added support for a new configuration setting, STARTD_RESOURCE_PREFIX . For more information, see section 3.3.9 on page .

• The number of CPUs Condor detects may now have an upper bound. The MAX_NUM_CPUS configuration setting controls this.

• When preempting a claim, the condor_ negotiator now prints the startd rank of the job that is being preempted and the startd rank of the job it is causing the preemption.

• Improved the error messages from condor_ check_userlogs, especially if it fails because it doesn't have write permission on the log files (unfortunately, the log reading code requires write locks to avoid collisions between multiple readers and writers).

• Improved error messages in condor_ dagman when getcwd() fails (this is only relevant if the -UseDagDir flag is used).

• Added QUILL_MANAGE_VACUUM to determine whether Quill needs to perform vacuuming tasks or not. In the latter case, vacuuming tasks can be automatically managed by PostgreSQL version 8.1 onwards. Please see Quill's section in the Administrator's Manual for more details.

• The Grid Monitor now works at sites where /etc/grid-security/certificates is out of date, but $(GLOBUS_LOCATION)/share/certificates is not.

• A new authentication method, PASSWORD, has been added; it provides mutual authentication between a client and server using a shared secret. Password authentication currently only works on Windows, and only for daemon-to-daemon communication.

• Condor on Windows now supports running jobs as the submitting user. This feature requires the use of a central daemon for storing users' passwords (the condor_ credd). See the example configuration file condor_config.local.credd included with the Condor distribution for more information.

• Added a -n option to condor_ store_cred to allow for storing a password to a remote host.

• Support for DRMAA on Windows has been added.
  
  

• Kerberos support has been upgraded to use version 1.4.3 of the Kerberos library. This adds support for Kerberos as an authentication method on Windows.

• Added the new condor_ replication daemon which works with condor_ had to enable replication of data for daemons configured for high availability. In particular, condor_ replication can be configured to replicate the accountant log so the a fail-over condor_ negotiator can share the user priority state from the primary condor_ negotiator.

• The condor_ collector now has the ability to receive ClassAds via it's SOAP interface.

• Fixed a memory corruption bug in condor_ quill where it could miscalculate the hostname of the db server to which it connects.

• Fixed a security hole in condor_ quill where the daemon would emit the quillwriter user's password in cleartext into the condor_ quill logfile.

• Fixed a bug in 6.7.17 that could cause the schedd state to be wiped out, clearing the contents of the job queue. The most likely case in which this problem could have happened is when the disk containing the spool directory became full and the schedd restarted several times due to failures writing to job_queue.log. The problem no longer exists in 6.7.18, but for users who cannot upgrade immediately, the workaround to prevent the bug from ever happening is to add the following line to your config file:

  MAX_JOB_QUEUE_LOG_ROTATIONS = 0

• Fixed a bug that could have caused corruption of the job queue log file in very rare circumstances involving a full disk. This potential problem existed in all previous versions of Condor.

• Fixed a problem with parallel universe jobs with multiple procs (i.e. multiple queue statements in one submit file). Before, in such a case, the user log would have multiple submit events per cluster but only one terminate event. This caused confusion for dagman. Now there is one submit event and one terminate event for such parallel universe jobs.

• A ClassAd bug that has existed since the Condor 6.3 series has been fixed, and it might affect your pool. In a ClassAd, MY and TARGET are supposed to narrow the scope for looking up a ClassAd variable. For instance, in a job's requirements, MY refers to the job's attributes, and TARGET refers to the machine's attributes. Unfortunately, since 6.3 MY and TARGET actually made a search order, not a scope restriction. That is, if a job's requirements had TARGET.foo and foo was undefined in the machine ad, it would look in the job ad for the value instead of deciding that foo was undefined. This is now fixed. However, there is a chance that users have made Classad expressions that confused MY and TARGET but worked. With this bug fix, they might not work anymore. We expect this bug fix to affect few users, but it may be tricky to understand for those of you that it affects. We needed to make this bug fix because the bug caused problems for some users that could not be worked around.

• Fixed a vague error message for the standard universe as to now emit reason for failure when reading a checkpoint image.

• Fixed a bug which was causing erroneous load average numbers for the AIX port of Condor.

• Fixed a bug which caused the update proxy command to the condor_ schedd to fail if the job was running and Condor was started as root.

• Fixed a bug which was causing jobs to never leave the "run" state if the condor_ schedd's cron/hawkeye feature is enabled. This bug was introduced with the addition of the cron logic to the condor_ schedd in 6.7.8.

• Improved how the condor_ gridmanager reacts to proxy delegation commands failing for grid-type gt4 jobs. Before, it could end up retrying the commands every couple seconds. Now, it retries them every 5 minutes.

• Fixed Condor's code for automatically starting a gridftp server for grid-type gt4 jobs to work when Condor is started as root.

• Scheduler universe jobs no longer inherit the environment of the condor_ schedd.

• Fixed a bug causing jobs to fail to run when submitted from a 6.7.15+ condor_ schedd to an older condor_ starter. This problem only affected jobs with no argument specification in the submit file or jobs with arguments specified in the new syntax (surrounded by double quotes).

• The condor_ c-gahp now ensures that arguments and environment in the job ClassAd are converted to a syntax understood by the target schedd. Previously (starting with 6.7.15), jobs with empty arguments/environment, or jobs using the new syntax for these would fail to run when submitted as Condor-C jobs targeting a pre 6.7.15 schedd.

• When running grid-type gt4 jobs with an automatically-started gridftp server, a restart of Condor could cause all of the gt4 jobs to be canceled and resubmitted due to the gridftp server's port changing. Now, the old port will be reused when possible.

• Fixed a bug that could cause the condor_ gridmanager to crash when running grid-type gt4 jobs with an automatically-started gridftp server.

• Fixed a bug that caused the condor_ c-gahp to exit if a file transfer failed.

• When a grid-type condor job is removed, any active file transfer for the job is aborted. Previously, the transfer would be allowed to complete before the job was canceled.

• Fixed bug where FileLock.pm was not included in release.

• Clusters of jobs using transfer-file mode and output or error files containing path information and references to $(Process) or $(Cluster) were incorrectly storing the output files in the initial working directory rather than the specified path. This happened for all jobs in the cluster except for the first job (process 0). This bug was introduced in 6.7.13.

• Previously, setting the default job environment within SUBMIT_EXPRS did not work, because condor_ submit would always override this default with an empty environment.

• Since 6.7.15, Condor-C has incorrectly handled the use of both remote_env and remote_args. The normal environment and arguments commands were honored, but the 'remote' versions were ignored unless the corresponding 'normal' command happened to be set to a double-quoted value (i.e. the new syntax for these settings). Now that this problem is fixed, when remote_env or remote_args is specified, it correctly sets the respective property of the job ClassAd in the remote schedd. It is still preferable to use the environment and arguments commands instead of the setting remote attributed directly, because then you can use either the new double-quoted environment/argument syntax or the old one, and condor_ submit will automatically set the correct ClassAd attributes.

• Fixed a bug in the -l option to condor_ q which, when querying Quill, used to display the attributes of the last cluster in every job ad even though they were submitted as part of different clusters.

• Fixed a bug in the Quill daemon which used to incorrectly parse classad attribute values of the form "number and some stuff" (e.g. attribute=Rank and value=1000 * memory).

• Added HAD to the default DC_DAEMON_LIST, both in the default condor_config and in the default list hard coded into condor_ master.

• Java universe jobs submitted with the old-style arguments syntax (argument string not surrounded by double quotes in the submit file) would fail to run (and therefore stay in the schedd job queue) if the path to Condor's execute directory contained a space (e.g. ``Program Files''). This bug was introduced in 6.7.15.

• Fixed a problem introduced in 6.7.17 where repeated ``ProcAPI sanity failure'' entries would appear in daemon logs on Windows.

• The -submitter option to condor_ q has been fixed to handle submitters in accounting groups.

• The condor_ shadow now correctly handles the case where RESERVED_SWAP is set to 0.

Known Bugs:

• None.