OK, some progress. After more work I determined that the bulk of the truly bizarre inconsistencies was down to obnoxious, intrusive behaviour in Ubuntu of gnome-keyring-daemon, for example see the following post:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/564821/why-cant-i-interact-with-my-ssh-agent-e-g-ssh-add-d-doesnt-work

which by the way has not been fixed as of 16.04 Ubuntu.

It seems gnome-keyring-daemon is a particularly badly-behaved utility and doesn't help itself with multiple autoload attempts at Ubuntu startup. You don't know what ssh agent is actually loaded and which RSA keys it has cached. It's also apparently very difficult to get rid of, although there are ways. I got it eventually to stop loading itself. (Perhaps the MPI community might whinge to Ubuntu about this behaviour? Many people have complained about the antisocial behaviour of gnome-keyring-daemon but so far Ubuntu's response has been: 'we can't see why this should be considered a problem. And we have doubts about what you're trying to achieve')

So now the problem has got to the point where there are 2 alternative error responses, both occurring at the MPI_Comm_spawn command. I've included typical error outputs for both scenarios, using the code posted earlier. The 2 errors occur with slightly different versions of the configuration file used to spawn the processes, which I'm also including. Obviously _2 files go together.

Any thoughts now on what might be causing either of these 2 problems? I find the gethostbyname failed messages particularly perplexing, since I'm able to ssh into the machines themselves without difficulty either by name or IP address.

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017 at 1:53 PM, Alexander Rast <alex.rast.technical@gmail.com> wrote:

I've reached a limit of mystification. Attempting to run an MPI application using MPI_Comm_spawn from a host is resulting in bizarre, inconsistent behaviour of ssh and ssh-askpass.

What I did is, I created an RSA keypair using ssh-keygen, copied the public keys into the ./ssh directories on the machines I'll be running MPI on, put them in the authorized_keys file, placed all the machines in the known_hosts file on the launcher host (which is starting MPI_Comm_spawn), then ran eval ssh-agent and added the id_rsa file to the agent on the launcher host.

You can verify that this part of the system is working because I can use ssh directly to access the worker machines that will be running the application.

But when I actually try to run the MPI application, when it gets to the spawn, all sorts of wierd and wild stuff happens. Sometimes a dialogue (which aggressively grabs focus) comes up asking for a password (OpenSSH Authentication). Other times the same program has just said that the identity/authenticity of the target machine can't be established - do I want to continue? (A yes causes authentication to fail). In still other cases, it appeared to open the connection but then MPI crashed saying it couldn't get the host by name. (yes, every machine has the hostnames of every other machine in its hosts file). And in yet another case, it seemed to try to run but then crashed saying unexpected end-of-file. And so on. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the errors, I can't reproduce anything, each time I try it some new and surprising behaviour comes up. What's happening? Do I have to do something unusual with machine configuration/environment?

Here are the associated MPI files if anyone wants to look for errors. In fact there are probably some errors in the code itself, because it's never been able to be debugged (because of this wierd behaviour) but I am fairly sure at least the sequence through to the spawn command is OK. All help appreciated...