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

[Joe Landman]

Chris Samuel wrote:
> 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.

Yes.  Can be a problem for any system.  However, in order to 
successfully use Linux clusters you do not need a virus checker running 
on the linux compute nodes.

> 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).

Heh.  :)  No comment ...

> 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..

The issue is that if you run a firewall on every machine, you are going 
to suck down your performance.  If you run a virus checker on every 
machine .... and so on.

You do not need to do this in the linux world.  You have no choice in 
the windows world.

Poor management and policy will kill even good systems.   Non-adaptive 
and platform centric policies will do the same.

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax  : +1 734 786 8452
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