Comments on: XgridDRMAA ObjC interface

By: charles

charles — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 04:46:03 +0000

It is a good idea to wrap the executable. I was thinking of doing that too for automatic caching of files and executables. Also, wrapping helps to catch more error and have more useful error messages.

Yes, definitely lots of good things!

By: Ed

Ed — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 19:43:46 +0000

Security’s not an answer here, because you can of course change the working directory from the executable. Or rather, in the case of non-SSO setups running as nobody, you can’t! I suspect the answer is that they didn’t think it would be necessary, since the executable can do it anyway. Unfortunately, that means the full DRMAA API can’t be supported fully by mapping things directly from DRMAA to Xgrid.

I could, however, decide to ship off a small executable or shell script with each DRMAA job that wrapped the “real” job, first changing directories (and failing if the privileges aren’t there).

That little executable could also collect better resource usage information, something that Xgrid doesn’t do natively…my, this is sounding like a good idea!

By: charles

charles — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 04:06:52 +0000

You are right. I never really used the ‘environment’ key, but this does not work:

{
jobSpecification = {
applicationIdentifier = “com.apple.xgrid.cli”;
inputFiles = {};
name = “/bin/sh”;
submissionIdentifier = abc;
taskSpecifications = {
0 = {
environment = { TEST = “testing”; PWD = “/bin”; };
command = “/bin/sh”;
arguments = (”-c”, “/bin/echo PWD=$PWD; /bin/echo TEST=$TEST; ls”);
};
};
};
}

Some security issue?? (this is always a good excuse!)