Notes on installing Condor on Windows / Win 7

Below you can read about some of the problems I encountered while testing Condor, along with some solutions/workarounds.

1) The Condor keyboard daemon (KBDD) does not work out of the box. If you start the condor_kbdd.exe process as the SYSTEM user (the default configuration), it will fail to register keyboard/mouse activity. Instead, you can configure Condor to not start the KBDD daemon by removing “KBDD” from the DAEMON_LIST in the configuration file. If you want to use the kbdd process you will need to run it as the the local (logged in) user.

2) When installing Condor manually you need to set the CONDOR_CONFIG environment variable *system wide* (not for the current user). Attempting to start the service when the environment variable is not configured yields this error: “Error 1067: The program terminated unexpectedly”. The manual mentions that instead of an environment variable we can also set several registry keys. I found this to be incorrect. Condor seems to completely ignore those registry keys. If I remember correctly, the installer does not even create them.

3) If the Condor service is configured to start at boot time it will sometimes (always?) fail. One theory is that this happens because Condor tries to establish network connections before the networking services are up. So you might want to delay starting the service until the machine booted up properly.