[torqueusers] Apache/PHP based job submission portal

[Joshua Bernstein]

On May 29, 2008, at 3:10 PM, Prakash Velayutham wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> This is not a Torque or Maui question, but I am very positive that  
> some of the bright guys here have this already setup in some form  
> or the other.
>
> We have a PHP-based web application which has a compute portion  
> which we want to ship out to our compute cluster. Also, the PHP  
> application is secure, meaning, only authenticated users can submit  
> jobs.
>
> My question is, how can I make the submitted jobs run as the logged  
> in user and not the generic Apache user (wwwrun or www or somebody  
> else based on the distro)?

It should be fairly straight forward to have the PHP/Apache  
application construct a job script. When the PHP scripts goes to qsub  
the script, instead of just doing a system("qsub..."), You should  
perhaps fork() and then setuid() to the username of user running the  
job. TORQUE would therefore see the job being submitted as the user  
rather then the www-data, or whatever user the web server is running  
as. I could see an issue though where the web user might not be able  
to setuid() to another user. I'd hesitate to run the web server with  
setuid privileges... Hmmm, it is a start though.

-Joshua Bernstein
Software Engineer
Penguin Computing