On 06/26/2014 08:59 AM, Gavin W. Burris wrote:
On Wed 06/25/14 07:14PM -0400, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote:
I ended up doing very crazy root-stealing, chroot-establishing things to get
my science done in my PhD. If you prevent intelligent people from doing
their work, they are going to be your worst nightmare. Don't kid yourselves
if you think you are doing anyone favors by providing super-static OS
environments like RHEL for your users. You are just being lazy (and not the
good kind of programmer lazy).
I don't think your IT staff is lazy for saying no to some requests. It
is unreasonable in the extreme to expect systems-level access on a
shared production system. If you want to operate at that level, you
should consider building a dedicated resource, possibly rolling cloud
image or VMs. I mean, unless you are also paying the bills, managing
staff time, attending weekly sysadmin meetings, and fielding support
tickets.
Gavin,
I think you're missing Ellis' point about serving the needs of the
users, but you do make a valid point, that is a constant source of pain
for system admins in general, not just HPC - we often can't justify
hours (more like days or weeks) of work to support a feature that
benefit one user for a short period of time, especially if that work
takes us away from working on things that will benefit many other users
in the long run.
Yes, this is a very simplified argument, and there's a lot of factors
that go into proper cost-benefit analysis, but it's common for a
researcher to ask us admins to devote an inordinate amount of time for a
request that will benefit some pet issue of theirs, but not provide ANY
value to any other user or the organization. Again - this is a
simplified argument and statement - don't flame me. I don't want to go
too far off-topic on this thread.
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