People still use our old-fashioned Unix login servers

Open up other machines to the internet and recommend people upload their code to github instead of the school's file server. People who want to read email can use their web browser to load gmail or outlook depending on what the school goes with. For the cron jobs I would want to know what is being scheduled before providing a recommendation on how you can get rid of the login server for it.

Going around a CS research department and asking the population there to justify their cron jobs and other stuff they run sounds like an excellent use of a (rare-ish) university admin / IT staff's time... /s

And deal with the ire of Professor Foo (and grad students Bar and Baz) who want/need to use obscure software XYZ and have done so for years (or decades) without any fuss. And build some interface between your HPC clusters and Github. And keeping with regulations and agreements on privacy and security. And so on and so forth. All that for the low, low cost of... Well, certainly not less than keeping and maintaining like one to three unix machines that don't need no fancy hardware or other special attention in the data center you are maintaining anyway?! Why?

edit: By the way, from their documentation, the department mentioned by the author runs their own E-Mail-Servers (as many universities do - fortunately, in this world, there often still is a bit more choice than 'use Gmail/Outlook in the browser').

Because this is something to do and solving real problems is way more annoying.

If you work on a smaller cluster in a research institution where in silico work represents only a small portion of the research output the management of the cluster will sometimes be subcontracted out to the general IT support shop. There an administrator - usually with not nearly enough experience will start receiving support requests from users with decades of unix experience which take hours of research to solve. Unable or unwilling (and because inactivity will look bad in the next meeting of department heads) the technician will start working on some "security" matter (so it sounds urgent and important). And this is how elimination of login nodes, cutting internet access to compute nodes, elimination of switches in the offices because they pose security risks (one might be able to connect an additional devices to the network) and implementation of 2FA on pubkey only login servers come in to existence.

Most of the cluster operators are wonderful. But a bad one can make a cluster significantly less useful.

>Why

The author proposed the thought experiment. Ask him, not me.

One of the things about Research Universities in particular is that there's always weird custom stuff everywhere. Thus "But why isn't it standard?" is a very stupid question. Doing the same things over and over but expecting different results isn't research it's insanity. So they're doing non-standard things because that's the whole point. There are systems that are "just" ordinary corporate stuff. Finance are not researching whether to pay suppliers, HR are not researching whether work contracts exist. But a lot of the organisation at any time is engaged in research, otherwise you're just a teaching university and to some extent that can actually be standardized and is the worse for it.

It’s a University: students are there to learn. Mulituser UNIX machines are great place to learn; I probably wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t cut my teeth on AIX, with ircii and pine for mail and X windows and a public_html directory making exploration fun and easy. Sure, you can give a student Outlook365 access and Wordpress, but will he learn anything from them?

The servers are for professors and graduate students, so this IT guy wants to block PhD students from doing AI research, demanding that they explain their cron jobs to him, because he thinks he can optimize them and save a few bucks.

He will certainly learn what an RCE is.

And when he does, the blast radius is a single unix box/VM or even a single account. You don't put institutionally-critical stuff on things like this. If it gets hacked, you shut it down, have everyone who logged in during the window change their password, and restore from backups or rebuild from scratch.