[Beowulf] Users abusing screen

[Prentice Bisbal]

On 10/24/2011 02:30 AM, Jan Wender wrote:
> On 10/21/2011 03:10 PM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
>> I have a question that isn't directly related to clusters, but I suspect
>> it's an issue many of you are dealing with are dealt with: users using
>> the screen command to stay logged in on systems and running long jobs
>> that they forget about. Have any of you experienced this, and how did
>> you deal with it?
> How about killing long-running (either elapsed or used time) processes not
> started through the batch system? You should be able to identify them by looking
> at the process tree.
> At least one cluster I know kills all user processes which have not been started
> from the queueing system.

The systems where screen is being abused are not part of the batch
system, and they will not /can not be for reasons I don't want to get
into here. The problem with killing long-running programs is that there
are often long running programs that are legitimate in my evironment. I
can quickly scan 'ps' output and determine which is which, but I doubt
that kind of intelligence could ever be built into a shell script.

--
Prentice