[Planetlab-announce] several announcements

[Larry Peterson]

This message includes several important announcements. Please
don't hit the delete key too quickly...

1) We just had an incident in which a slice was compromised
    because a user's private key (on his desktop) was compromised.
    Please be sure that to protect your private keys.

2) With the NSDI deadline fast approaching, it's likely that
    PlanetLab will be heavily loaded the next two weeks. Please
    keep a close eye on your experiments. To help combat run-away
    jobs, we are deploying a daemon that will watch swap space
    utilization (the primary indicator of a soon-to-wedge machine)
    and kill the biggest memory user whenever utilization gets too
    high. You will be notified when this has happened, and your
    slice will be suspended should it become a repeat offender. You
    should all feel free to report excessive resource usage (e.g.,
    slices with thousands of processes) to the offending slice; CC
    the support mailing list if you do.

3) There is a lot of valuable information submitted to the users
    mailing list, but the number of people with PlanetLab accounts
    that subscribe to the users mailing list is quite small (only
    488 of 1228 total users). Visit

        http://lists.planet-lab.org/mailman/listinfo/users

    to join the users mailing list.

4) New minimal hardware requirements are effective today. Please
    check http://www.planet-lab.org/consortium/hardware.php to make
    sure your machines are up-to-spec.

Larry