Starting Up, Shutting Down and Reconfiguring the System

If you installed HTCondor with administrative privileges, HTCondor will start up when the machine boots and shut down when the machine does, using the usual mechanism for the machine’s operating system. You can generally use those mechanisms in the usual way if you need to manually control whether or not HTCondor is running. There are two situations in which you might want to run condor_master, condor_on, or condor_off from the command line.

  1. If you installed HTCondor without administrative privileges, you’ll have to run condor_master from the command line to turn on HTCondor:

    $ condor_master
    

    Then run the following command to turn HTCondor completely off:

    $ condor_off -master
    
  2. If the usual OS-specific method of controlling HTCondor is inconvenient to use remotely, you may be able to use the condor_on and condor_off tools instead.

Using HTCondor’s Remote Management Features

All of the commands described in this section are subject to the security policy chosen for the HTCondor pool. As such, the commands must be either run from a machine that has the proper authorization, or run by a user that is authorized to issue the commands. The Security section details the implementation of security in HTCondor.

Shutting Down HTCondor

There are a variety of ways to shut down all or parts of an HTCondor pool. All utilize the condor_off tool.

To stop a single execute machine from running jobs, the condor_off command specifies the machine by host name.

$ condor_off -startd <hostname>

Jobs will be killed. If it is instead desired that the machine stops running jobs only after the currently executing job completes, the command is

$ condor_off -startd -peaceful <hostname>

Note that this waits indefinitely for the running job to finish, before the condor_startd daemon exits.

Th shut down all execution machines within the pool,

$ condor_off -all -startd

To wait indefinitely for each machine in the pool to finish its current HTCondor job, shutting down all of the execute machines as they no longer have a running job,

$ condor_off -all -startd -peaceful

To shut down HTCondor on a machine from which jobs are submitted,

$ condor_off -schedd <hostname>

If it is instead desired that the access point (which runs the condor_schedd) shuts down only after all jobs that are currently in the queue are finished, first disable new submissions to the queue by setting the configuration variable

MAX_JOBS_SUBMITTED = 0

See instructions below in Reconfiguring an HTCondor Pool for how to reconfigure a pool. After the reconfiguration, the command to wait for all jobs to complete and shut down the submission of jobs is

$ condor_off -schedd -peaceful <hostname>

Substitute the option -all for the host name, if all submit machines in the pool are to be shut down.

Restarting HTCondor, If HTCondor Daemons Are Not Running

If HTCondor is not running, perhaps because one of the condor_off commands was used, then starting HTCondor daemons back up depends on which part of HTCondor is currently not running.

If no HTCondor daemons are running, then starting HTCondor is a matter of executing the condor_master daemon. The condor_master daemon will then invoke all other specified daemons on that machine. The condor_master daemon executes on every machine that is to run HTCondor.

If a specific daemon needs to be started up, and the condor_master daemon is already running, then issue the command on the specific machine with

$ condor_on -subsystem <subsystemname>

where <subsystemname> is replaced by the daemon’s subsystem name. Or, this command might be issued from another machine in the pool (which has administrative authority) with

$ condor_on <hostname> -subsystem <subsystemname>

where <subsystemname> is replaced by the daemon’s subsystem name, and <hostname> is replaced by the host name of the machine where this condor_on command is to be directed.

Restarting HTCondor, If HTCondor Daemons Are Running

If HTCondor daemons are currently running, but need to be killed and newly invoked, the condor_restart tool does this. This would be the case for a new value of a configuration variable for which using condor_reconfig is inadequate.

To restart all daemons on all machines in the pool,

$ condor_restart -all

To restart all daemons on a single machine in the pool,

$ condor_restart <hostname>

where <hostname> is replaced by the host name of the machine to be restarted.

Reconfiguring an HTCondor Pool

To change a global configuration variable and have all the machines start to use the new setting, change the value within the file, and send a condor_reconfig command to each host. Do this with a single command,

$ condor_reconfig -all

If the global configuration file is not shared among all the machines, as it will be if using a shared file system, the change must be made to each copy of the global configuration file before issuing the condor_reconfig command.

Issuing a condor_reconfig command is inadequate for some configuration variables. For those, a restart of HTCondor is required. Those configuration variables that require a restart are listed in the Macros That Will Require a Restart When Changed section. You can also refer to the condor_restart manual page.