[Beowulf] Security issues

[Tim Cutts]

On 25 Oct 2008, at 5:01 am, Matt Lawrence wrote:

> On Fri, 24 Oct 2008, Alan Ward wrote:
>
>> Perhaps an alternative way to go for a cluster install disk would  
>> be a bog standard Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu boot iso image,  
>> with a customized install script that pulls in a suplementary set  
>> of packages over the network and does some extra configuration (NFS  
>> server, PXE server etc).
>
> Close.  I recommend a very short and simple script that installs a  
> configuration management system such as Puppet, cfengine or bcfg2  
> and then those do all the other work.  Once the infrastructure is  
> set up, it is very easy to do with CentOS and kickstart.

Yep, that's what we do.  We actually use the same Debian FAI  
installation infrastructure for everything; compute nodes, head nodes,  
desktops, database servers (except Oracle), you name it.  cfengine  
takes care of tweaking the configuration and installed packages to the  
actual purpose of the machine.

Tim


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