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Changes To Generic NQS 3.50.1

September 1996

Stuart Herbert (S.Herbert@sheffield.ac.uk)

Document copyright ©. All rights reserved.

Abstract

This document lists changes which occured from Generic NQS 3.50.0 to Generic NQS 3.50.1.

Contents

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Introduction

About This Release

 Generic NQS 3.50.1 is the first maintenance release of Generic NQS 3.50. Its purpose is to fix bugs identified with Generic NQS 3.50.0.

There is no additional functionality included in this release. However, SETUP itself does have some extra functionality in order to do its job better.

Contacts For Contributors

The following individuals have contributed to this release :

  • Chuck Robey (chuckr@eng.umd.edu)
  • David Billinghurst (billingd@crc.cra.com.au)
  • Stuart Herbert, Generic NQS Maintainer (S.Herbert@sheffield.ac.uk)
  • Michael Andrews (marctpas@globalvision.net)
  • Michel Proulx (proulx@radon.sao.nrc.ca)
  • Thomas Hiller (hiller@tu-harburg.d400.de)

New Operating Systems

FreeBSD 2.2

 Generic NQS now compiles and runs on FreeBSD 2.2.

Contributed by Chuck Robey.

New Functionality

qstat -d Wrapper Script Contributed

 A script has been contributed which simplifies the output of the qstat -d command. The script can be found in contrib/qstat.

Contributed by Michel Proulx.

Changes To Existing Functionality

SETUP Creates Files With Umask 022

 SETUP in v3.50.0 created all files using a umask of 0, which is something of a security hole.

This behaviour has been fixed.

All platforms affected.

Contributed by Michael Andrews.

Prologue/Epilogue Scripts Now Have More Info

In v3.50.0, prologue and epilogue scripts were given very little information about the process which was about to run.

By popular demand, v3.50.1 now places all of the information available to the actual job in the environment of the prologue and epilogue scripts, a la CERN NQS (but achieved in a different way). Hopefully this will satisfy the needs of more users.

All platforms affected

Code contributed by Stu

SETUP Gives More Info

SETUP has been modified to tell you more about what it is actually doing while it is running, and also how you can use command-line parameters and makefiles with SETUP if you prefer.

All platforms affected

Code contributed by Stu

Fixed Bugs

SETUP / Cannot Find Local Machine ID Bug Fixed

 Due to an error which occured when SETUP was trying to work out whether NQS was already installed or not, SETUP failed to tell new users that they must create a machine ID database.

This has now been fixed.

All platforms affected.

I've lost count of the number of people who have contributed this fix - many thanks to everyone!

SETUP / Install Workstation Option Fixed

If you used SETUP's `Install Workstation' option to compile and install Generic NQS on a clustered workstation, this option would fail because of missing source code files.

This option has now been completely re-written so that it only makes use of utilities previously compiled using SETUP.

All platforms affected.

Contributed by Stu.

Nice Value Support Fix

Generic NQS v3.50.0 broke the support for nice values.

This code has been fixed on all platforms.

Contributed by Stu.

Machine ID Database Fix

On certain 64-bit platforms, the machine ID database code simply didn't work. In v3.50.0, I introduced new code to try and ensure that the machine ID was a 32-bit value; it appears that this caused problems on some 64-bit platforms.

Extra code has been put into place to cope with the two possible definitions of the data type `Mid_t', which will hopefully fix this problem.

All OSF/1 platforms affected.

Code contributed by Stu, with many thanks to Peter Lister and Larry Watson for their contributions.

Loaddaemon Fix For Solaris v2.5

On Solaris v2.5, the existing loaddaemon code failed to obtain the load information from the operating system.

The code has been modified to use a supporting library supplied with the operating system.

All Solaris 2.x platforms affected.

Contributed by Thomas Hiller (hiller@tu-harburg.d400.de)

Certain Network Messages Fix

In v3.50.0, a bug was introduced which meant that all network messages which had 0 integers and 0 strings were no longer processed correctly.

Incorrectly placed braces have now been sorted out.

All platforms affected.

Contributed by Michael Andrews (marctpas@globalvision.net)

Pre-Release Support For HP-UX v9

It is my intention that all pre-releases of Generic NQS are compiled with the debugging flags enabled, to help ensure correct behaviour and to make it possible to use a debugger.

This support has now been added for HP-UX v9.

Contributed by Michael Andrews.

Build GNQS.VERSION Correctly

In v3.50.0, the GNQS.VERSION file was often created empty, due to a bug in SETUP.

This has now been fixed for all platforms.

Contributed by Michael Andrews.

SETUP Now Creates Spool Directory

In v3.50.0, a bug in SETUP meant that the spool directory wasn't correctly created if it didn't already exist.

This has now been fixed for all platforms.

Once again, I've lost count of the number of people who sent me this fix - thanks everyone!

SETUP Now Creates Spool Directory Not Spool Directory/nqs

In v3.50.0, if you said that you wanted the spool directory in /var/spool, the spool directory would be called /var/spool/nqs.

This behaviour proved very unpopular, and has been dropped.

Contributed by Stu and many others!

SETUP Install Files Modified

A number of fixes/modifications to the way SETUP installs Generic NQS have been made :

  • suid bits are no longer set on nmapmgr and qacct.

    Long term, all the suid bits need removing.

  • install_nqs.xxx script has been phased out - the functionality has been moved into other install scripts.

    This is to ensure consistency between the different installation options.

  • Staged installation installs the qmgr.hlp file.

  • Blank nqs.prologue and nqs.epilogue files are now created, to prevent problems when Generic NQS is compiled with this feature enabled.

All platforms affected.

Contributed by Michael Andrews

Root Jobs Between Machines Now Uses Strict Security

The user root can now only pass a job between two NQS machines if the root user uses .rhosts file. All mappings in /etc/hosts.nqs are now explicitly ignored for root.

All platforms affected.

Contributed by Michael Andrews.

HP-UX v10.10 Support Updated

Thanks to feedback from HP-UX v10.10 users, changes have been made which should allow Generic NQS v3.50.1 to compiler out-of-the-box on this version of HP-UX.

The changes affect all HP-UX versions.

Contributed by Stu, with thanks to Ulrich Gemkow.

Ultrix v4 Compilation Fixes

Ultrix v4 has different parameters to the openlog() call than the rest of the world, which prevented Generic NQS v3.50.0 compiling out of the box. Ultrix v4 also doesn't support the -x test in shell scripts.

This has been fixed. This fix is the first code which adds new code in a platform-specific sub-directory, so I wouldn't be surprised if problems occured ...

Ultrix v4 affected.

Code contributed by David Billinghurst

Old-Style Log File Support Now Completely Removed

The last remains of the old `qmgr set log_file' and the logdaemon support in Generic NQS has now been removed.

This is listed as a bug because I should have done this for v3.50.0. I assumed that people would read the documentation and not report that `qmgr set log_file' didn't work as a bug.

All platforms affected.

Code contributed by Stu and Michael Andrews.

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