From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <9bf62e0038ba2467adf591128b50a6d1@plan9.ucalgary.ca>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] 9grid
Date: Wed,  8 Jun 2005 20:28:58 -0600
From: andrey mirtchovski <mirtchov@cpsc.ucalgary.ca>
In-Reply-To: <900df5c2ae4a2724ba43e65672dba394@orthanc.cc.titech.ac.jp>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5ca302e8-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025


> What about other issues like posting spam and organising DDos attack?

users don't (aren't supposed to) have access directly to the compute
nodes of the clusters on a particular "grid", only to the head nodes
where they submit their jobs.  in theory they should submit jobs from
their local workstation even.  ok, you can take the head node off
(which may or may not be redundant) and that's it, jobs still run.
technically all the main services such as schedulers, file and
monitoring run somewhere else.  a real malicious attack would target
the main service providers such as the file server or the scheduler,
without which a cluster isn't of much use.

you can only do that once anyway, especially on high-profile networks.
once you get caught you're off.  and all those nodes are used to
downtime anyways :)

on the other hand it's much more interesting to try and figure out a
way to usurp the schedulers so you consume more than your dedicated
fair share of resources.  now that's really tricky to prevent :)