[Beowulf] Why I want a microsoft cluster...

[Chris Samuel]

On Thursday 24 November 2005 08:30, Joe Landman wrote:

> Look carefully at what the CTC has to go through with their systems.  If
> you are running 1000 copies of Norton on your disks, with each one
> loaded up with a personal fire wall, anti spyware and virus ... do you
> really have a cluster?

This can be a problem for Linux clusters too, when you have IT security people 
who don't understand Linux and impose policy as if it were Windows.

I've seen one site where the corporate security policy decreed that all PC's 
ran a virus checker.  When they got their new Linux/AIX cluster (part IA32 
part Power4) their security folks decreed that all the front end Linux nodes 
must run a virus checker and that all the users filestore should be scanned 
daily (from the Linux management node).

Only one problem - the users filestore was NFS mounted from an AIX storage 
node. It was also huge.

Virus checking for Windows viruses on a Linux cluster (behind an extremely 
tight firewall) ended up taking much longer than 24 hours, and they had an 
awful positive feedback situation that virtually killed their management node 
after a few days..

-- 
 Christopher Samuel - (03)9925 4751 - VPAC Deputy Systems Manager
 Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing http://www.vpac.org/
 Bldg 91, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia

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