[Planetlab-devel] opening up GetSliceTicket()

[Justin Samuel]

Hi David,

We are hoping to release the next version of our software very soon that
will require the GUI having access to this public key information. We're
not trying to make too much extra work for anyone or make urgent
requests, but if there is no objection to this information being made
available through the API then the sooner it is made available, the
better for us.

To summarize, we are in need of having our GUI be able to make API calls
on behalf of a PlanetLab user to retrieve a list of public keys for all
other PlanetLab users that have access to the same slices as the user
using our GUI does.

This can be through multiple API calls our GUI makes to gather the
needed info, or one API call that provides more info than needed which
we can then filter out what we want. We don't have a problem conforming
to whatever methods are made available, we just need some way to access
this info.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please let us know.

Thank you!

Justin S.


On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 08:09 -0700, Justin Cappos wrote:
> We want any user of our GUI to be able to access this information.
> The GUI will parse and act on this data on the behalf of the user.
> Thus any account we use for this will be accessed by all the users of
> our GUI.
> 
> I would think it would be better to have each user's account able to
> do the look up for their own slices (perhaps through a new call), but
> I'm open to suggestions...
> 
> Thanks,
> Justin
> 
> On 8/20/07, David E. Eisenstat <deisenst at cs.princeton.edu> wrote:
> > 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
> >
>