[slurm-users] --uid , --gid option is root only now :'(

[John Marshall]

On 10 May 2018, at 19:48, Christopher Benjamin Coffey <Chris.Coffey at nau.edu> wrote:
> We noticed that recently --uid, and --gid functionality changed where previously a user in the slurm administrators group could launch jobs successfully with --uid, and --gid , allowing for them to submit jobs as another user. Now, in order to use --uid, --gid, you have to be the root user.

Relatedly, we have a pipeline robot user that is a member of a number of Unix groups corresponding to different scientific projects. Its dispatcher scripts submit jobs with

	sbatch --gid=$group_for_project ...

so that the jobs run as the particular robot-uid/project-gid and output files generated automatically get the appropriate project group ownership.

Though the man page says --gid is for when "sbatch is run as root", we found that it works and so we used it so that the (completely unprivileged) robot user could select which of its supplementary groups to run jobs as.

On bug 4101 Tim also wrote:

# Admittedly, the 'su' command is preferable in almost all instances, and I would
# suggest anyone with such a workflow move to that rather than this quirky approach.

To me, SLURM is in the business of setting up jobs from whole cloth, and it would be preferable to be able to specify the desired group (of which the user is already a member) on the sbatch command line rather than having to wrap the whole thing in an extra layer of sg(1).

    John