[Labs-l] Impending change of DOOM!!1!one!

Mon Sep 16 17:55:54 UTC 2013

That got you to read.  :-)

During this coming week, operations is going to be making a change in 
how the labs environment allocate and names service groups 
(specifically, they are going to be renamed from "local-foo" to 
"projectname.foo" and made globally visible).  This change is necessary 
in order to add new requested functionality and for some future 
improvements we have on the roadmap.  We do not have a precise moment 
for the change to be deployed yet, but we will notify the list and IRC 
channel as soon as we know.

In practice, this will have no effect on projects not making use of 
service groups/accounts (which, I believe, is most of them) and the 
impact on those that do should be relatively minor.  System level tools 
will be adapted to match (so that 'become', for instance, will keep 
working), and since gid/uid will not be affected this means that 
permissions will not require tweaking.  Additionally, credentials to 
access the database replicas are also based on user and group ID and 
will not be affected by a rename.

That said, if you have code that refers to service groups by name, they 
will have to be adapted.  Also, it's not clear how gridengine will deal 
with the renaming for running jobs.  (Experiments I did show that 
continuous jobs will keep running but no longer be attached to the 
renamed account requiring admin intervention to stop them).

I and Ryan, at least, will be on hand during and after the switch to 
help work out any of the kinks that may turn up as a result of the 
change.  While we expect that the impact is going to be mostly minor, do 
keep an eye out for strange behaviour from tools or running code.

-- Marc