Skip to content

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