+1
From: Ling Gao [mailto:ling...@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2014 10:10 AM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Cc: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [Ironic][Agent] Ironic-python-agent
Hello Vladimir,
I would prefer an agent-less node, meaning the agent is only used under
the ramdisk OS to collect hw info, to do firmware updates and to install nodes
etc. In this sense, the agent running as root is fine. Once the node is
installed, the agent should be out of the picture. I have been working with HPC
customers, in that environment they prefer as less memory prints as possible.
Even as a ordinary tenant, I do not feel secure to have some agents running on
my node. For the firmware update on the fly, I do not know how many customers
will trust us doing it while their critical application is running. Even they
do and ready to do it, Ironic can then send an agent to the node through
scp/wget as admin/root and quickly do it and then kill the agent on the node.
Just my 2 cents.
Ling Gao
From: Vladimir Kozhukalov
<vkozhuka...@mirantis.com<mailto:vkozhuka...@mirantis.com>>
To: "OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)"
<openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org>>,
Date: 04/04/2014 08:24 AM
Subject: [openstack-dev] [Ironic][Agent]
________________________________
Hello, everyone,
I'd like to involve more people to express their opinions about the way how we
are going to run Ironic-python-agent. I mean should we run it with root
privileges or not.
>From the very beginning agent is supposed to run under ramdisk OS and it is
>intended to make disk partitioning, RAID configuring, firmware updates and
>other stuff according to installing OS. Looks like we always will run agent
>with root privileges. Right? There are no reasons to limit agent permissions.
On the other hand, it is easy to imagine a situation when you want to run agent
on every node of your cluster after installing OS. It could be useful to keep
hardware info consistent (for example, many hardware configurations allow one
to add hard drives in run time). It also could be useful for "on the fly"
firmware updates. It could be useful for "on the fly" manipulations with lvm
groups/volumes and so on.
Frankly, I am not even sure that we need to run agent with root privileges even
in ramdisk OS, because, for example, there are some system default limitations
such as number of connections, number of open files, etc. which are different
for root and ordinary user and potentially can influence agent behaviour.
Besides, it is possible that some vulnerabilities will be found in the future
and they potentially could be used to compromise agent and damage hardware
configuration.
Consequently, it is better to run agent under ordinary user even under ramdisk
OS and use rootwrap if agent needs to run commands with root privileges. I know
that rootwrap has some performance issues
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-March/029017.html but
it is still pretty suitable for ironic agent use case.
It would be great to hear as many opinions as possible according to this case.
Vladimir Kozhukalov_______________________________________________
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