[Beowulf] mandatory use of command qsub

[Chris Dagdigian]

On May 14, 2008, at 12:44 PM, Javier Lazaro wrote:

> How to prevent users run tasks without qsub command?  
> _______________________________________________


How about disabling interactive login/SSH access?

One other method that I've heard of that was pretty clever ...

Assuming you are talking about Grid Engine 'qsub' then you can have a  
cron job that does a "kill -9" on any user process that is not a  
direct child of an sge_shepherd parent process. All valid SGE jobs run  
as children of a user-and-job-specific shepherd.

The real answer though is this:

- Technological fixes to preventing user abuse of a cluster will never  
work in the long run. The user has far more time and motivation to  
game the system than the admin staff have to detect and mitigate the  
problem

This means that the real solution is actually more of a human- 
resources, acceptable use policy or other "political" solutions. The  
problem must ultimately be solved as a matter of proper communication,  
documentation and written policies. People who abuse the system get a  
warning from their manager, people who continue to abuse the system  
get their account logins revoked or (in a corporate world) a referral  
to the HR department.

My $.02 of course.

-Chris