perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Jeff W.Boote <>]

Jim, Yee,

We of course put every effort we can into keeping up to date with all  
security patches. We intend to document our strategy along with a  
policy on what OSs we support in time for the next major release. (And  
some of it is likely to make it into the next minor release due out  
'real soon now'.) If you have ideas on what can be said for this that  
would make it easier to make the case for your security guys, I'd love  
to hear them.

That said, I'd like you to keep in mind that perfSONAR-PS is an open- 
source project. If you look at the license you will see a DISCLAIMER  
section. I only bring this up because of the SLA comment in this  
thread. SLAs imply a contract. A contract typically has two sides. If  
you want an SLA, you will likely need to pay for it. (And if you want  
to do that, please let me know. I can investigate the potential for  
Internet2 or perhaps another organization to provide this kind of  
service for a fee.)

Thanks,
jeff

On Jan 23, 2010, at 5:42 PM, Li, Yee-Ting wrote:

> We, at SLAC, also have similar requirements and would love to  
> something similar. Whilst we are dedicating some time (trying to)  
> building own own up-to-date iso's, i think it would be of huge  
> benefit to the community if the toolkit can be kept up-to-date wrt  
> to zero-day exploits etc.
>
> This is especially important due to the requirement to have the  
> hosts internet visible.
>
> Whilst we have managed to persuade our security guys that this is a  
> useful product, we have had to put in a provision in our security  
> plan that if the distro falls behind, then we will literally just  
> turn the box off - which kinda defeats the purpose of a monitoring  
> box imo.
>
> Yee.
>
>
> On 23 Jan 2010, at 16:29, jim warner wrote:
>
> > At the San Antonio member meeting performance workshop I heard it  
> > said
> > that users of the knoppix perfsonar distro could expect support.   
> > In the
> > event of critical security updates, we could count on an  
> > announcement on
> > the mailing list and a fixed ISO image.  That promise means a lot  
> > to us,
> > if I really heard it -- if I didn't make it up.  I sometimes hear  
> > what I
> > want to hear rather than what's said.
> >
> > If there is no promise of enough support to make the Knoppix
> > distribution an appliance, I probably cannot run it as a service in  
> > my
> > data center.   That would be too bad, because so far it looks really
> > useful.  I am hoping for an SLA-like statement for the distribution  
> > as
> > part of announcement on toolkit page.  I need something to show to  
> > the
> > data center management group.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > -jim warner, UCSC