Emacs in a terminal via qrsh on Sun Grid Engine - text rendering

[Seb James <seb@esfnet.co.uk>]

Hello Emacs folks,

I have a problem with emacs used within a terminal on my university's
high performance computing (HPC) system, which runs Scientific Linux
with GNU Emacs 23.1.1(*)

The problem is incorrectly rendered text, such as might be seen if the
terminal settings were incorrectly matched between the client terminal
and the user's environment on the server. The text can be corrected with
a C-l, as reported by other users who have had mis-rendered text
problems. The sort of misrendering is very similar to that reported
here, although the cause is different there:

http://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/9512/why-does-the-buffer-get-garbled

Our HPC system runs Sun's Grid Engine to manage all the worker nodes.
Here is the workflow: I ssh on to the head node, then to do any work, I
am required to request a session on one of the worker nodes. To do this
I use the Sun Grid Engine (SGE) binary "qrsh" which opens a remote shell
on a host of SGE's choosing. If I now emacs -nw somefile.cpp, I quicly
see mis-rendering of the text.

Recently emacs became available on the head node, and I see no such
problem when using emacs in the terminal on this system. Therefore, the
problem seems to occur only when using qrsh to get to a worker node.

I have studied my TERM environment variable. On my Linux client system
it is xterm-256color, on the head node it is also xterm-256color and on
the worker node the same.

I've looked at stty output, here are the changed values on the worker
node:

[me@hpcnode03 ~]$ stty 
speed 38400 baud; line = 0;
-brkint -imaxbel
-onlcr

And on the head node:

[me@myhpc-login1 ~]$ stty
speed 38400 baud; line = 0;
eol = M-^?; eol2 = M-^?;
-brkint ixany

I forget the details, but I did tinker with stty at one point, changing
numerous settings without finding one that fixed the problem.

I encounter the problem regardless of which client terminal I use to
connect to the HPC system (via ssh on Debian or Ubuntu or putty on
Windows and I think I tried ssh from Mac, too).

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to debug this? Of course, it
may be a bug in Sun Grid Engine's qrsh program. Does anyone else on the
list use emacs via Sun Grid Engine? Seen this issue?

Any help much appreciated, even if it's just a confirmation that I'd
have to take this up with the maintainers of Sun Grid Engine (I have
tried our HPC system support team, but they've not been able to figure
out a solution).

best regards,

Seb James

(*) GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.18.9) of
2013-07-17 on sl6.fnal.gov.