#2574: alias patterns for BlueWaters and frontera conflict

Reporter: Roland Haas Status: new Milestone: Version: ET_2021_05 Type: bug Priority: major Component: SimFactory

Both Blue Waters and Frontera define somewhat lenient regular expressions to match for their respective login nodes. Namely:

``` aliaspattern = ^h2ologin[1-4](.ncsa.illinois.edu)?$ ```

and

``` aliaspattern = login[1234](.frontera.tacc.utexas.edu)?$ ```

In particular Frontera’s is too lenient since it misses the `^` anchor to anchor the regex to the beginning of the string making it match any node whose name contains `login[1234]`. This was encountered in real live by Cheng-Hsin Cheng  while testing the BBH gallery example on BlueWaters.

This confuses `sim setup` (and `setup-silent`) but does apparently not face `sim whoami`, which on Blue Waters at least returns `bluewaters`. Possibly b/c Blue Waters is alphabetically first.

There are two things that should be fixed by:

1. add a `^` to the alias pattern for Frontera 2. check whether one can leave in the FQDN instead of just the hostname itself since `login` since a fairly typical (if annoyingly generic) hostname (eg Stampede2, also TACC, uses the same name). 3. simfactory should warn / abort if more than one machine definition files aliaspattern matches I think (unless the pattern is emtpy, which we use for “alternative” machine definition files).

Should be backported.

-- Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2574/alias-patterns-for...