Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!sandstorm.Berkeley.EDU!dpassage
From: dpassage@sandstorm.Berkeley.EDU (David G. Paschich)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: process priorities (problem?)
Message-ID: <1991Mar10.121848.8362@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 10 Mar 91 12:18:48 GMT
References: <18030@milton.u.washington.edu> <504080ad.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator)
Organization: UC Berkeley Open Computing Facility
Lines: 33

In article <504080ad.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> smv@apollo.HP.COM (Steve Valentine) writes:
>It has long been the Apollo position that Domain Nodes are single user machines.
>We try very hard to make the node as usefull as possible to it's one user.
>An ordinary, unpriviledged user in this environment may very well have reason to
>adjust the priority of some process on his or her node, and can only hurt
>themselves by doing so.  When nodes are used in shared environments,
>their users must learn that it is socially unacceptable to take advantage of
>If we required root access to renice processes,
>we would be depriving our users of a feature that they have become accustomed to
>and which we feel they can benefit from.

From the man page for renice:
>     Users other than the super-user may only alter the priority of processes
>     they own, and can only monotonically increase their "nice value" within
>     the range 0 to PRIO_MAX (20).

It would be nice if Apollo documentation were true.

Actually, just because Apollo lets users renice things doesn't mean you have
to:

sandstorm [100] su
Password:
# chown root //*/etc/renice
# chmod 700 //*/etc/renice

Drastic, but on an open cluster like ours, it's definitely necessary.  This
still isn't complete; nice, which is built into csh, will still let anyone set
negative priorities on processes when you start them.

David G. Paschich
dpassage@ocf.berkeley.edu
Just say not to huge .sigs!