Why am I unable to start workers via a remote ssh session with Distributed Computing Toolbox on UNIX machines for R2006b or older?

With R2006b or older, upon starting a worker by directly opening an ssh session into a user or root account, the following error message is displayed:

"timeout creating child process"

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This enhancement has been incorporated in R2007a. For previous product releases, read below for any possible workarounds:

This bug has been fixed in R14SP3. For previous product releases, read below for any possible workarounds:

To resolve this issue, you should instead log into the machine and perform an "su" command to login to the user account to start the mdce service.

This will also prevent the service from shutting down when you exit the ssh session.

1. Login to the machine:

ssh hostname

or

ssh user@hostname

2. "su" into the account to start mdce (usually root):

su root

3. Start the mdce service and the worker or job manager from this login session.

You should now be able to exit this session if needed, and the service will continue to run successfully.

• NOTE: Starting in R2019a the following name changes occurred:
  • MATLAB Distributed Computing Server was renamed to MATLAB Parallel Server 
  • mdce_def was renamed to mjs_def
  • mdce binary was renamed to mjs