scrontab is disabled by default on ParallelCluster¶
Date: 2026-04-13. Impact: training.
← back to the Exercise Validation summary
What happened¶
user/recurring-jobs-scrontab.md teaches scrontab -e /
scrontab -l / scrontab -r. On a stock ParallelCluster 3.15
deployment every call errors with
scrontab: fatal: scrontab is disabled on this cluster.
To enable it, slurm.conf needs ScronParameters or an
equivalent CustomSlurmSettings entry in the pcluster
cluster-config. That change requires a cluster update
(rolling, but non-trivial) — we haven't applied it to the
validation cluster yet because the exercise is orthogonal to
most of the training.
Training content direction: the exercises should either add a deployment callout ("scrontab is disabled on pcluster/PCS by default — enable with CustomSlurmSettings") or the validation cluster should enable scrontab so captures are available.
For now, the harness skips the scrontab tests cleanly when
the feature is disabled. Re-enable by adding
- ScronParameters=enable (or equivalent) to
cluster-config.yaml.tpl SlurmSettings and re-running
make tf-apply && make create-cluster.
Fix commits¶
slurm-training-validation@pending— recurring-jobs-scrontab.bats setup() skips when scrontab disabled