[Radiance-general] ranimate Host directive

[Greg Ward]

Hi Terrance,

This is the as-designed behavior for ranimate.  The basic assumption  
is that you have an NFS-shared filesystem or the like where user names  
are preserved.  Therefore, even if you are logging in as a different  
user on the remote machine, it assumes you want to execute ranimate in  
the originating user's home directory, and you have set up directory  
and file permissions accordingly.  I suppose I should add a check on  
the remote directory, and if a full path is given, forego the cd to  
the originating home directory.

The recommended workaround if this is not the case is to write your  
own remote ssh-replacement and do whatever custom things you want done  
with that, assigning the RSH variable in the .ran file.

-Greg

> From: Terrance Mc Minn <t.mcminn at curtin.edu.au>
> Date: March 14, 2010 12:42:37 AM PST
>
> I have been experiencing errors when attempting to use ranimate  
> across multple host computers. Specifically if the remote host does  
> not have the same user name accounts.
>
> extracted from the .ran file:
> host= localhost 1 /export/ranimate/current muser
> host= remote1 1 /export/ranimate/current
> host= remote2 1 /export/ranimate/current ruser
>
> where muser is the user account name where the ranimate command is  
> issued and ruser is the user name on the remote2 computer.
>
> The ranimate man page states:
> host
> A host to use for command execution. This variable may be assigned a  
> host name, followed by an optional number of parallel processes,  
> followed by an optional directory (relative to the user's home  
> directory on that machine), followed by an alternate user name.  
> Multiple host assignments may appear. It is not advisable to specify  
> more than one process on a single-CPU host, as this just tends to  
> slow things down. The default value is "localhost", which starts a  
> single process in the current directory of the local machine.
> clearly it seems that the intended operation is to work from the  
> users account
>
> However when the fourth parameter is used eg remote user name,  
> ranimate only users this in the ssh command and reverts to the  
> master user name in the cd commands (The user name on the master  
> computer that initiated the ranimate process). This can be seen in  
> the dump from remote 2 using the ps x command:
>
> ruser    4403  1.0  0.1   4712  1700 ?        Ss   15:58   0:00 bash  
> -c cd ~muser ; cd /export/ranimate/current ; pfilt -1 -e -2 -x 1854 - 
> y 822 -pa 1 animat
> ruser    4404  3.0  0.0   2052   788 ?        D    15:58   0:00  
> pfilt -1 -e -2 -x 1854 -y 822 -pa 1 animation_process_network/ 
> frame022.unf
>
>
> Is this behaviour the intended process or a missing issue in the man  
> pages.
>
> It should also be noted that as soon as a dummy account is made on  
> the remote2 computer under the name of muser, everything continues  
> as expected (without any changes to the ran file - that is still  
> using the ruser parameter)!
>
> -- 
>
> Regards
>
> Terrance Mc Minn