🚀 go-pugleaf

I, as well many other people, have recently become disgruntled about
what may be some misuse of computing resources.  I've resisted
complaining about this for a while now.

While we have quotas and dial-up limits, there doesn't seem to be much
preventing a few users from bringing one of the most important
resources of the CS department to its knees.

More specifically, I'm talking about students running large
CPU-intensive processes across the department's best machines 24 hours
a day, 7 days a week, for weeks at a time.  I am _NOT_ talking about
opening up a few copies of Netscape, Rational Rose, or whatever on
somebody else's machine.

One recent example is someone has been almost continuously using many
of the better CS workstations to crack an RSA encryption key as part
of a challenge that some internet users have taken an interest in.  Is
*that* a worthy use of our departments scarce resources?

As another example, some grad students have been running large
processes across many of the same machines for 24/7 for at least a
week ("src*******").  Who knows what they are doing.  

These people don't even bother to use "nice" to reduce the priority of
their processes.

To make things worse, some of the machines being seriously bogged down
are normally pretty fast and among the only ones with 24-bit displays.
(ie. Those of us interested in graphics prefer to use them.)  Because
of these processes (and defunct Netscape sessions), many of these
workstations are so slow that they're barely even usable.  Even
redirecting the display from another machine is slow.

Luckily, we have a bunch of new machines (only 8 bit displays!??) but
it's only a matter of time before they are all bogged down too.  Using
CSU's CS network as a nice distributed parallel "machine" can be
useful, but can also be taken too far.

(Tip: To find the offenders, use the command 'top' on machines that
are bogged down.  When you see a process using most of the CPU that's
been running for hundreds or thousands of minutes (or more...), that's
what I am talking about.)