[StarCluster] Windows Python support

[Bob Tolbert]

Hi Justin, 

Sounds great. I'll see what I can do to work on some patches for Windows support. 

PuTTy is an interesting idea since the built-in SSH underneath StarCluster (from Paramiko maybe) has very limited terminal support resulting in a rather unusable interactive sesstion. Still very good for just running commands via ssh.

I've also noticed that the plotting doesn't work. For example "starcluster spothistory -p m1.xlarge" does start the web server and presents a page in the browser, but the plot is blank.  I'll see if I can find out more about where that is failing.

Thanks for the quick response.

Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Riley [mailto:justin.t.riley at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2012 9:48 AM
To: Bob Tolbert
Cc: StarCluster at mit.edu
Subject: Re: [StarCluster] Windows Python support

Hi Bob,

I'm personally not a Windows user but I do like the idea of having StarCluster run on all platforms - just needed someone to come along that wanted Windows support :D

You're right that pwd and grp are not available on Windows, however, fortunately StarCluster's use of these modules is very light in the sense that it mostly just uses simple data structures from these modules that could easily be mocked in the case that a try/catch on importing pwd/grp failed.

Ideally the sshmaster/sshnode commands would also be updated to support using PuTTY on Windows, however, StarCluster does come with it's own built-in SSH shell if it fails to find the 'ssh' executable on the default PATH so this isn't crucial to StarCluster working on Windows.

I've filed a bug to keep track of this here:

https://github.com/jtriley/StarCluster/issues/63

If you're interested in submitting patches please see the guide here for how to go about that:

http://web.mit.edu/stardev/cluster/docs/latest/contribute.html

Assuming it all works well I'll merge your changes in the next stable release. Otherwise I'll contact you for testing when the time comes :D

Thanks for reporting,

~Justin

On 12/31/2011 11:04 PM, Bob Tolbert wrote:
> First, let me say that I've only used StarCluster for a week or so, 
> but I am very impressed. I desperately needed the notion of a SGE 
> queue in
> EC2 and not having to set it up myself it awesome.
> 
>  
> 
> I naively installed on Windows using Windows Python 2.7 and things 
> almost work. In one place, there are a couple of imports that are not 
> on Windows ("pwd" and "grp") but it seems StarCluster is very close to 
> supporting Windows.
> 
>  
> 
> I suspect everything might work under Cygwin, but for reasons I don't 
> want to go into, I really don't want to use Cygwin.
> 
>  
> 
> I'm more than willing to work on Windows support, just not sure if 
> anyone else might be interested.
> 
>  
> 
> Bob Tolbert
> 
> 
> 
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