carl@CITHEX.CALTECH.EDU.UUCP (07/17/86)
There's been a lot of traffic through this teleconference recently involving execution of commands on a remote host via DECnet. There has also been, in the past year, a significant amount of munching on at least one large (>500 nodes) DECnet, some of it involving exactly the sort of procedures being circulated in response to questions in this TC. This prompts me to remind participants in this TC of what might be termed a point of DECnet etiquette: The default DECnet account tends to be charged to some sort of overhead account on many VAXen, so any costs associated with its use tend to be unrecoverable in any useful sense; further, because of the fact that it tends to be accessible to anybody on the same DECnet, system managers, or on systems with a separate security manager, the security manager, tend to view use of that account that doesn't fit their expectations for that use (e.g., new .COM files showing up, execution of images they hadn't intended be available to that account, sharp increases in system resource consumption, etc., ad nauseum) with some degree of alarm. Their reactions to such use can vary from ignoring the usage to severe restrictions on the use of the account, even so far as cutting off default DECnet access from all but selected nodes, and such reactions are, in many cases, justified. Therefore, it behooves you, in the event you want to have the account do something it didn't do in the past, to contact the system manager of the appropriate machine and ask for his advice on 1) whether the use is appropriate (if not, your next step is to negotiate for an account on his machine) and 2) what the appropriate means of implementing the new use might be. Failure to do so can lead to loss of DECnet access to the machine in question for virtually all users on the DECnet, so it seems to me that the time and effort to make such inquiries is quite justified. Besides, if you find a friendly system manager, he can be a valuable source of information on how you can make VMS work for you more efficiently.
KFL%MX.LCS.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU.UUCP (07/18/86)
From: carl@CitHex.Caltech.Edu (Carl J Lydick)
The default DECnet account tends to be charged to some sort of overhead
account on many VAXen, so any costs associated with its use tend to be
unrecoverable in any useful sense; further, because of the fact that it
tends to be accessible to anybody on the same DECnet, system managers ...
tend to view use of that account ... with some degree of alarm.
We solved that by giving everyone a PROXY account. If someone has a
PROXY account on the destination machine, any NETWORK jobs of theirs
will execute in that account rather than the DECnet default account.
Before we did theis, some users would execute expensive tasks in the
DECnet default account to avoid being charged for their usage.
...Keith