On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 16:20, Steve Coleman wrote: > > Another suggestion I have is to have a long term objective of > incorporating OpenMosix like capabilities in order to add application > migration and interprocess communication through network shared IPC. Speaking as someone who looks after a Mosix cluster, from what I've read I doubt Mosix will ever make it into the official Linux kernel. A downside for Stateless Linux is that you have to have the same kernel running on all nodes. As I say, I like Mosix, and look after it. > It would also be nice to have some form of a VPN used during the boot > process and subsequent distribution of runtime images. Make it easy to > boot secure and the rest of the security will fall into place. I don't see what you are trying to achieve here. Given a bare-metal machine, the only unique thing on it is the MAC address on the NIC. That is of course used to allocate DHCP addresses etc. We, and many other cluster vendors, use the MAC address as the unique aspect of a node. Yes, you can generate host keys and have the central server retrieve them, but that's in the firstboot stage. Early in the boot/install process you only have the MAC address. I suspect your concept is 'only securely identifiable machines get access to the VPN to then get their PXE download, DHCP, image download...'. My contention is that the MAC is the only 'key' at this stage. And swapping machines out for new in a MAC based environment is easy. If you are considering some physical way to distribute keys to a VPN then it won't scale - either in the data centre environment with 1000's or nodes in a cluster, or in the corporate environment where a tech would have to deliver a floppy/USB stick/dongle... I'm happy to be proved wrong. Maybe there's a scheme to allocate keys over the network.
