[mpich-discuss] Race condition when accessing ~/.smpd during startup

[Reuti]

Hi,

to implement  a daemon based smpd startup method for MPICH2 (1.0.8) I  
use a loop across all elected machines which a chosen port. The  
shutdown takes the same list in reverse order. I.e. the daemon on the  
master node of the parallel job is shutdown of last, so that for a  
shutdown no ssh or alike is necessary as I use "smpd -port $port - 
shutdown $host".

This works fine, but from time to time I see a message in the logfile  
of the script: "Please specify an authentication passphrase for this  
smpd: Would you like to save this passphrase in '/home/ 
reuti/.smpd'?", either during startup or shutdown of the daemons.  
Well, there is of course a passphrase in ~/.smpd.

I put now a "sleep 1" in the loops and this seems to avoid the problem.

As the dynamic_hosts="node001 node002" are also memorized in ~/.smpd:  
can it be a race condition, when the daemons are started/shutdown too  
fast? Can the modification of this file be switched off?

-- Reuti