11.2 Development Release Series 8.9

This is the development release series of HTCondor. The details of each version are described below.

Version 8.9.1

Release Notes:

• HTCondor version 8.9.1 released on April 17, 2019.

New Features:

• The deprecated HOSTALLOW… and HOSTDENY… configuration knobs have been removed. Please use ALLOW… and DENY…. (Ticket #6921).
• Implemented a new version of the curl_plugin with multi-file support, allowing it to transfer many files in a single invocation of the plugin. (Ticket #6499). (Ticket #6859).
• The performance of HTCondor’s File Transfer mechanism has improved when sending multiple files, especially in wide-area network settings. (Ticket #6884).
• Added support for passing HTTPS authentication credentials to file transfer plugins, using specially customized protocols. (Ticket #6858).
• If a job requests GPUs and is a Docker Universe job, HTCondor automatically mounts the nVidia GPU devices. (Ticket #6910).
• If a job requests GPUs, and Singularity is enabled, HTCondor automatically passes the –nv flag to Singularity to tell it to mount the nVidia GPUs. (Ticket #6898).
• Added a new submit file option, docker_network_type = host, which causes a docker universe job to use the host’s network, instead of the default NATed interface. (Ticket #6906).
• Added a new config knob, DOCKER_EXTRA_ARGUMENTS, to allow admins to add arbitrary docker command line options to the docker create command. (Ticket #6900).
• We’ve added six new events to the job event log, recording details about file transfer. For both file transfer -in (before/to the job) and -out (after/from the job), we log if the transfer was queued, when it started, and when it finished. If the event was queued, the start event will note for how long; the first transfer event written will additionally include the starter’s address, which has not otherwise been printed.

  We’ve also added several transfer-related attributes to the job ad. For jobs which do file transfer, we now set JobCurrentFinishTransferOutputDate, to complement JobCurrentStartTransferOutputDate, as well as the corresponding attributes for input transfer: JobCurrentStartTransferInputDate and JobCurrentFinishTransferInputDate. The new attributes are added at the same time as JobCurrentStartTransferOutputDate, that is, at job termination. This set of attributes use the older and more deceptive definitions of file transfer timing. To obtain the times recorded by the new events, instead reference TransferInQueued, TransferInStarted, TransferInFinished, TransferOutQueued, TransferOutStarted, and TransferOutFinished. HTCondor sets these attributes (roughly) at the time they occur. (Ticket #6854).

• Added support for output file remaps for URLs. This allows users to specify a URL where they want individual output files to go, and once a job is complete, we automatically uploads the files there. We are preserving the older implementation (OutputDestination), which puts all output files in the same place, for backwards compatibility. (Ticket #6876).
• Added options f (return full target string) and g (perform multiple substitutions) to ClassAd function regexps(). Added new ClassAd functions replace() (equivalent to regexps() with f option) and replaceall() (equivalent to regexps() with fg options). (Ticket #6848).
• When jobs are run without file transfer on, usually because there is a shared file system, HTCondor used to unconditionally set the jobs argv[0] to the string condor_exe.exe. This breaks jobs that look at their own argv[0], in ways that are very hard to debug. In this release of HTCondor, we no longer do this. (Ticket #6943).

Bugs Fixed:

• Avoid killing jobs using between 90% and 99% of memory limit. (Ticket #6925).
• Improved how "Chirp" handles a network disconnection between the condor_starter and condor_shadow. "Chirp" commands now return a error and no longer cause the condor_starter to exit (killing the job). (Ticket #6873).
• Fixed a bug that could cause condor_submit to send invalid job ClassAds to the condor_schedd when the executable attribute was not the same for all jobs in that submission. (Ticket #6719).

Version 8.9.0

Release Notes:

• HTCondor version 8.9.0 released on February 28, 2019.

Known Issues:

This release may require configuration changes to work as before. During this release series, we are making changes to make it easier to deploy secure pools. This release contains two security related configuration changes.

• Absent any configuration, the default behavior is to deny authorization to all users.
• In the configuration files, if ALLOW_DAEMON or DENY_DAEMON are omitted, ALLOW_WRITE or DENY_WRITE are no longer used in their place.

  On most pools, the easiest way to get the previous behavior is to add the following to your configuration:

  ALLOW_READ = *  
  ALLOW_DAEMON = $(ALLOW_WRITE)

  The main configuration file (/etc/condor/condor_config) already implements the above change by calling use SECURITY : HOST_BASED.

  With the addition of the automatic security session for a family of HTCondor daemons and the existing match password authentication between the execute and submit daemons, most hosts in a pool may not require changes to the configuration files. On the central manager, you do need to ensure DAEMON level access for your submit nodes. Also, CCB requires DAEMON level access.

New Features:

• Changed the default security behavior to deny authorization by default. Also, neither ALLOW_DAEMON nor DENY_DAEMON fall back to using the corresponding ALLOW_WRITE or DENY_WRITE when reading configuration files. (Ticket #6824).
• A family of HTCondor daemons can now share a security session that allows them to trust each other without doing a security negotiation when a network connection is made amongst them. This “family” security session can be disabled by setting the new configuration parameter SEC_USE_FAMILY_SESSION to False. (Ticket #6788).
• Scheduler Universe jobs now start in order of priority, instead of random order. This is most typically used for DAGMan. When running condor_submit_dag against a .dag file, you can use the -priority <N> flag to set the priority for the overall condor_dagman job. When the condor_schedd is starting new Scheduler Universe jobs, the highest priority queued job will start first. If all queued Scheduler Universe jobs have equal priority, they get started in order of submission. (Ticket #6703).
• Normally, HTCondor requires the user to specify their credentials when using EC2 (via the grid universe or via condor_annex). This allows users to use different accounts from the same machine. However, if a user started an EC2 instance with the privileges necessary to start other instances, and ran HTCondor in that instance, HTCondor was unable to use that instance’s privileges; the user still had to specify their credentials. Instead, the user may now specify FROM INSTANCE instead of the name of a credential file to indicate that HTCondor should use the instance’s credentials.

  By default, any user with access to a privileged EC2 instance has access to that instance’s privileges. If you would like to make use of this feature, please read 6.4.1 before adding privileges (an instance role) to an instance which allows access by other users, specifically including the submitting of jobs to or running jobs on that instance. (Ticket #6789).

• The condor_now tool now supports vacating more than one job; the additional jobs’ resources will be coalesced into a single slot, on which the now-job will be run. (Ticket #6694).
• In the Python bindings, the JobEventLog class now has a close method. It is also now its own iterable context manager (implements __enter__ and __exit__). The JobEvent class now implements __str__ and __repr__. (Ticket #6814).
• the condor_hdfs daemon which allowed the hdfs daemons to run under the condor_master has been removed from the contributed source. (Ticket #6809).

Bugs Fixed:

• Fixed potential authentication failures between the condor_schedd and condor_startd when multiple condor_startds are using the same shared port server. (Ticket #5604).

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