[Planetlab-devel] opening up GetSliceTicket()

[David E. Eisenstat]

On Sat, 11 Aug 2007, David E. Eisenstat wrote:

> On Sat, 11 Aug 2007, Justin Samuel wrote:
>
>> Back in May, you pointed us to the NodeManager API's GetSSHKeys() and 
>> that's been working great for us. However, we now also need access to 
>> this same information from outside of PlanetLab.
>> 
>> As far as I'm aware there is currently no way to get these keys through 
>> the PLC API. I've looked at the documentation and I only see methods 
>> for retrieving one's own keys. --- Would it be possible to make 
>> available something similar to GetSSHKeys() in the PLC API? What we 
>> ultimately need are the public keys for either a single slice or those 
>> for all slices the user can access.
>
> You are correct that there is currently no way to achieve this without 
> an administrator role.
>
> <snip>
>
> If there are other arguments in favor of information hiding, I'd like to 
> hear them.

Tony raised the point that users might be confused by the extra 
information that the API would return if we were to change it, and 
suggested the introduction of a new role that would be able to read 
everything. I submit that (1) people who use the API directly tend to be 
more sophisticated users of PlanetLab than average, and they can filter 
the API output for themselves or end users; (2) if API calls returned full 
information for all roles, then API scripts would function more uniformly 
across roles, which would ease testing/debugging.

Also, if I were a PI, I would want to be able to find out who's running 
(and who can run) on my nodes. I'm not sure how actual PIs feel about 
this.

-David