Network Activity

[ereisch]

We have a number of installations of Visual Fortran on our network, which is unfortunately not always connected to the internet.  When the internet is unavailable, the ifort program takes an exceptionally long time to start/run.  Thus, building our program of ~1000 source files takes hours rather than the usual minutes.  Some quick poking around and we have some suspicions that it has something to do with DNS, presumably because DNS lookups are timing out.  When we unplug the network interface to the system altogether, the builds go back to normal speed.

Is there some ET-Phone-Home feature of ifort on Windows that is attempting some network activity on each startup?  Is it possible to disable this functionality via a command-line option?  If not, would it be possible to divulge the DNS name it's trying to look up so that we can have our DNS server immediately return a SERVFAIL or NOTFOUND error, rather than timing out?

Thanks in advance.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

No, there is nothing in the current version of the compiler that connects to an external server. The only network access is if when searching for a license file, a system environment variable INTEL_LICENSE_FILE or LM_LICENSE_FILE is defined that points to some server on your network.  My guess is that even though you may have a local license file, one of these environment variables is defined and the compiler's license management code is following it.

You can test this by starting a Fortran command prompt session, typing:

set INTEL_LMD_DEBUG=1
ifort

You should see debug output from the license search code that tells you what it is doing.

[ereisch]

The only thing of interest in there is it's trying to check out a license for "MICFCompW", and was unable to find one.  Not sure what this is, since the FCompW checked out just fine.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Which compiler version are you using?  Did it indicate it was searching other locations?  Are either of those environment variables defined?  The check for the MICFCompW license is an error.

[ereisch]

Intel® Visual Fortran Compiler XE for applications running on IA-32, Version 12.1.0.233 Build 20110811

The two locations it was searching for are C:\Program Files\Common Files\Intel\Licenses;C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Intel\Licenses

INTEL_LICENSE_FILE is defined, and set to the first of the above two paths.  The other variable is not defined.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Ok. Please install the most recent update (which would be 12.1.5.344. I think what is happening is that the inappropriate check for the other feature name was causing a delay somehow. You should find the newer version corrects the problem.  Let me know if it does not.

[#7]

ereisch wrote:

We have a number of installations of Visual Fortran on our network, which is unfortunately not always connected to the internet.  When the internet is unavailable, the ifort program takes an exceptionally long time to start/run.  Thus, building our program of ~1000 source files takes hours rather than the usual minutes.  Some quick poking around and we have some suspicions that it has something to do with DNS, presumably because DNS lookups are timing out.  When we unplug the network interface to the system altogether, the builds go back to normal speed.

Is there some ET-Phone-Home feature of ifort on Windows that is attempting some network activity on each startup?  Is it possible to disable this functionality via a command-line option?  If not, would it be possible to divulge the DNS name it's trying to look up so that we can have our DNS server immediately return a SERVFAIL or NOTFOUND error, rather than timing out?

Thanks in advance.

[ereisch]

We installed version 13.0.0.089 Build 20120731, but are unfortunately still having the problem. The program is no longer trying to check out that other feature (FCompW is the only one), but it still hangs for about 5 seconds before dumping the INTEL_LMD data. If there was a Windows equivalent of 'strace' I might be able to provide more insight as to where it was hanging at, but alas, none exist.