Re: Hot-patching

Jesper Juhl
2005-09-20T23:07:23Z

On 9/21/05, John Richard Moser <nigelenki@comcast.net> wrote:
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> Jesper Juhl wrote:
> > On 9/21/05, John Richard Moser <nigelenki@comcast.net> wrote:
> > [snip]
> >
> >>Besides getting rid of a pet peeve of mine (more rebooting than
> >>absolutely necessary) and giving a way to continuously increase the size
> >>of the running kernel with each bugfix, this has implications on servers
> >>that don't want to reboot for whatever reason. For enterprise
> >>applications, it would be possible to fix a kernel bug or security hole
> >>that hasn't been triggered by loading a module with the bugfixes,
> >>effectively hot-patching the kernel.
> >>
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > If you have uptime demands like that I think a much better approach
> > would be to make sure the box is heavily firewalled so importance of
> > the security of the host itself drops. If there's no way to get to a
> > box in a way that enables you to actually exploit a security hole,
> > then it doesn't matter much that the hole is there at all.
>
> Yeah. Not always feasible though; let's say the bug manifests in
> something Apache tells the kernel to do (there's quite a lot of
> syscalls) based on stuff passed to CGI scripts. Firewalls and
> everything, but slide in a "legitimate" port 80 or port 443 access and BLAM.
>
> Shell servers like compile farms are also interesting, if you want to
> talk about firewalling not being all that great. That's of course if
> you care about local attacks; personally if I have 10000 employees or
> clients using a machine I don't want to trust them all to be nice.
>

Firewalls are not a panacea, no. But for many (not all) issues, good
firewalling can eliminate the immediate need to patch a server.

> >
> > Another option would be a clustered setup where you normally run the
> > app(s) on nodeA, nodeB ... nodeN, then when you need to upgrade you
> > move all running applications off of nodeA and upgrade it, move
> > everything off of nodeB and then upgrade that, repeat for nr of nodes,
> > finally redistribute the load properly again.
> >
>
> Beautiful setup that, and surprisingly cost effective if 1) you can do
> it yourself, and 2) you're using just 2 nodes. I'd prefer 3 nodes for a
> minimal set-up of course, so if I upgrade one and the other goes down I
> still have a third; I'm obsessive about perfectly stable environments,
> it has to be able to stand up to a bomb blast or the ending scene from
> Hackers with all the blackhats in the world tearing ass at the system.
>

A few links you may want to take a look at :

http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/
http://www.linux-ha.org/
http://lcic.org/ha.html
http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/

--
Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
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