Henry Nebrensky <[log in to unmask]> writes:
> On Fri, 25 Feb 2005, Leif Nixon wrote:
>> Henry Nebrensky <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>>
>> On the other hand, not having general network connectivity for the
>> nodes means you lose the ability to do all sorts of nifty things. I'm
>> not sure it's worth it.
>
> Nifty things like sending out spam or attacking a third party - which can
> be done as a "legitmate" job using a stolen cert. And of course it's the
> farm site (us) that gets seen as the source of the attack...
Obviously. I've been thinking about renting grid resources to
spammers; that would be a nice source of income when funding is
scarce.
> I'm not sure it's LCG's job to do "nifty" stuff - running an executable so
> as to process a datafile seems pretty mundane... and that's roughly where
> we are at the moment for both MC and analysis.
But if you want to move towards a general purpose grid that's not
enough.
For example, I have a bioinfo user (on Nordugrid, not LCG) who manages
his workload by sending out a steady stream of generic grid jobs. On
execution start, the jobs phone home by XMLRPC to a director server
and ask for their actual computation task. For various reasons it
would be suboptimal to "brand" the jobs with a particular task at
submission time.
Other users have huge datasets where you don't know beforehand what
data the job will need, and where you really want to access your data
through a database search, not by file transfer, because of the way
the data is structured.
One can probably come up with workarounds for stuff like this; "here
is the Approved Way to access your MySQL server at home through an
authenticated web service call to the centralized MySQL proxy". That
won't be fun for very long when users keep coming up with new
requirements that your architecture wasn't built for.
You know, totally firewalling the resources might make them a less
attractive target for bad guys, but it sure makes them less attractive
to potential users, as well.
--
Leif Nixon - Systems expert
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National Supercomputer Centre - Linkoping University
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