On 04/18/2013 12:21 PM, Nicholas M Glykos wrote: > In the same way you wouldn't allow a general > user to override the safety interlocks of an X-ray generator, you > shouldn't allow root access to the general users of a shared computing > facility.
Please describe what the grad student who pioneers new tech for X-ray generators should do, particularly if they are trying to develop new safety interlocks. There is an appreciable community of graduate students and other types of researchers who are completely screwed by this limited vantage point. This is why I consider even admins at universities "IT professionals." Not because I want to piss them off when often they have grad degrees themselves, but because they are so "business-focused" and unwilling to accommodate the strange and often atypical requests that research demands that they are more comfortable with a given cluster sitting totally idle than letting a researcher use and learn from it, possibly at the risk of breaking it. There needs to be, at the very least, a testbed in universities where students can receive and be able to use root on a limited set of machines. Obviously I don't expect to be granted root on PSU's CyberStar cluster, which many other scientists at the university use for their own research, but I don't appreciate being marginalized just because I don't fall into this terribly limited viewpoint on what researchers can and cannot do. This is exactly why I have to spend my own money (which is naturally limited as a grad student, and to the dismay of my wife) to run my own cluster and build my own storage at home, so I can do research without constantly having day or more delays in trying to flush a cache or do something similarly simple but requiring of root. Best, ellis _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
