Hi folks,
We had a user take out their rogue job array with a “qdel -W force 12345678[]” last night. Nice of them to kill the job, as it wasn’t running as they’s hoped, but we then saw “Deleting job history upon request from username” in the logs. Surprisingly, “qstat -fx 12345678[]” showed “qstat: Unknown Job Id 12345678[].servername”.
Is this expected behaviour? Should unprivileged users have the right to remove the history of their jobs from the history?
Regards,
Scott
From the Reference guide section on qdel:
" When this command is used without the -x option, if job history is enabled, the deleted job’s history is retained. The -x option is used to additionally remove the history of the job being deleted.
If someone other than the job’s owner deletes the job, mail is sent to the job’s owner, or to a list of mail recipients if specified during qsub"
So, they shouldn’t have been able to delete the job without the -x option, but other than that it seems like PBS will allow a job’s owner to delete the history of their job. I’m not sure if there’s a switch which can allow admins to reject such an action, I request others to correct me if I’m wrong. I guess you could create a hook to reject such job delete requests if you didn’t want this to happen, that’s one way to prevent it from happening.
I take it back, I don’t think there’s a hook that can catch delete job requests for non-running jobs. So, I’m afraid there might be no way to prevent the job owner from doing this, I again request others to correct me if I’m wrong.
An admin could write a wrapper for qdel to prevent a user from using the -x option, but there doesn’t seem to be a setting within PBS to prevent it.