Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rpi!crdgw1!uunet!mcsun!tuvie!mike
From: mike@vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at (Michael K. Gschwind)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: process priorities (problem?)
Message-ID: <2379@tuvie.UUCP>
Date: 14 Mar 91 12:04:27 GMT
References: <18030@milton.u.washington.edu> <504080ad.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Sender: news@tuvie.UUCP
Organization: Vienna University of Technology
Lines: 36

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.
This is the old Apollo comment trying to sell bugs as features...

>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,

What happens if the user renices disk servers? The registry deamon? 
The glbd? There are vital services running which need to be available to
the net as a whole! (TCP gateways, servers for diskless computers) 

>their users must learn that it is socially unacceptable to take advantage of
>some of the features available.  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.

There are many simple ways to accomplish renicing other users' processes
if this is policy at some site:

1.) You can set the suid bit on /etc/renice.
2.) There could be some configuration file indicating whether every 
	user should be allowed to renice processes.


				bye,
					mike


Michael K. Gschwind, Dept. of VLSI-Design, Vienna University of Technology
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