Meeting

["Stefanovski, Sasko" <sstefano@richmond.edu>]

Dr. Gilfoyle,

>i will be in town next wednesday.
>i think it would be useful to meet and discuss some things and i can
>give you the password at that time. i would like to talk about the
>possibility of getting some new machines and adding them to the 
>cluster. we would use the racks from the old cluster which would 
>mean at least starting to dismantle the old cluster. what would be
>a good time to meet?

>let me know what you think.

I have no planed activities for the next Wednesday so far. 
Is it 10am o.k. with you, so I can update my calendar?

I did apply security errata to some of the installed packages. 
Since the cluster is running customized kernel, it is impossible to update
the following packages with the general RedHat updates:
   nfs-utils,
   modutils,
   losetup,
   mount
   lpr
   wu-ftpd
   at
   util-linux
   openssl
   openssl-devel
   openssl-pyton
   openssl-perl
   glibc
   glibc-devel
   kernel
   kernel-headers

Some of them have serious security issues and it is strongly recommended to
apply their fixes. However, since the current installed versions are
customized by Scyld engineers, we have to options:
- either wait for patch from Scyld (I am not so optimistic on this)
- put the cluster beside the firewall (an old box with 2 NIC's running the
latest RedHat image would do the trick). 

I vote for the second options. In that case we wouldn't have a vulnerable
system exposed directly to outside world. That wouldn't affect the way the
cluster is being used or his services accessed.


What do you think about this? I would like to chat more on this next
Wednesday.

Regards,
Sasko