[mpich-discuss] mpich2-1.3.2-install

[Dave Goodell]

On Mar 1, 2011, at 7:57 AM CST, Nicolas Rosner wrote:

>> You r right, permissions-related [problems] disappear when i log on as a regular user
> 
> Actually: when you did that AND started from scratch in that user's
> home dir (just as important, or even more so).
> 
>> But root's permission higher than regular user‘s, why operation not permitted?
> 
> No idea. Did you unpack as root? Did you switch users before
> configure? Ran any chmod after unpacking? Perhaps the sources were on
> a network share with its own idea of security, or mismatched UIDs?
> Many possible causes...

Nicolas raises a likely point about the network shares.  NFS mounts are commonly setup such that root has no special permissions on the exported volume (called "root squashing").  See "B11" from here: http://nfs.sourceforge.net/

>> Although ./configure  executed correctly, make has one error (m.txt)
> 
> Indeed, and it's rather explicit: "Autoconf version 2.63 or higher is
> required." (I wonder if you didn't get this previously because of
> different PATHs, or because your build process never reached that
> point last time.)
> 
> Check your version of autoconf -- either it's finding the wrong one or
> none at all, or you have a really old one and will probably want to
> upgrade autotools via rpm or something. Can't tell you exactly what to
> do, but hope this helps.

As a user, you shouldn't need to have autoconf or any of the the autotools installed at all.  Instead what appears to be happening is that your MPICH2 source files have an incorrect timestamp for some reason, which causes the make system to attempt to rebuild the "configure" files.  Sometimes this can happen when building on NFS, which doesn't always manage timestamps as well as a local filesystem.

Try rebuilding from a fresh tarball on a local path.

-Dave