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conference reports This issue’s report focusses on LISA LISA XVI only, so single failures aren’t fatal but only reduce capacity. XVI Sixteenth Systems Administration Conference To answer a query, the Web server (a custom package called gws) queries PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, index servers, document servers (cached USA pages), and ad servers, in parallel, and OUR THANKS TO THE SUMMARIZERS: NOVEMBER 3–8, 2002 keeps trying until it gets a response. KEYNOTE Each query may involve a dozen or more servers, using whichever reply comes in for LISA ’02 SCALING THE WEB: AN OVERVIEW OF the fastest (the average query time is .23 Josh Simon, who organized the collecting of GOOGLE (A LINUX CLUSTER FOR FUN seconds). Before the query reaches a the summaries AND PROFIT) Abiodun A. Alao Web server, however, it passes several Jim Reese, Chief Operations Engineer, Paul Anderson Google load balancers, both global and local, David Berg which use various methods (including Robert Beverly Summarized by J.D. Welch round-robin and least connections) to Kuzman Ganchev We all know, use, and love Google, but Jim Hickstein choose which servers to query. Rob Kolstad how do they make it work? In this Martin Krafft engaging talk, Jim Reese explained how “El Cheapo” PCs are used to maximize Renuka Nayak custom software, massive replication reliability through replication. Fault tol- James O’Kane and expendable, commodity hardware erance is kept very simple; timeouts are Will Partain have allowed Google to answer 150 mil- in the milliseconds, and machines are Peg Schafer restarted automatically and regularly J. D. Welch lion Web search queries a day. polled for their status. Racks of Steve Wormley The core technology that separates Garry Zacheiss machines are very dense, with 80 half- Google from other search services is the depth 1U boxes in each, along with PageRank system developed by founders paired switches, load balancers, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin while gradu- Gigabit uplinks to the routers. All disks ate students at Stanford University. This are local (100–120Gb/machine); large system aims to objectively rank Web fans are mounted atop the rack and heat content by popularity; according to is drawn from the space between the Reese, “a page’s importance is the sum of machines in the center of the rack. All the aggregate importance of the pages the machines run a “Googlized” distri- linking to it,”so a page linked to from bution of RedHat Linux as well as pro- the New York Times is given more weight prietary tools for serving content and than one linked to by a high-school system monitoring. newspaper. In addition to assessing pop- ularity, hypertext analysis is used to For comparison with the new, very quantify the importance of elements on organized racks, Reese showed photos of a page (e.g., larger text is probably more historical configurations, including a important). custom-built 1U machine with four motherboards, eight disks, eight NICs, To get a sense of scale of Google’s chal- and one power supply, which was con- lenge – there are 3.8 billion pages and figured with the disks mounted over the 256 million Web users, and 85% of them processors separated by a sheet of Plexi- use search services. Given this, any single glas (!). machine will always be too small for the task, so index and page data is divided up into pieces, called “shards,”which are distributed across many machines and multiple data centers. Thus, traffic is scalable by replication; the index is read- 64 Vol. 28, No. 1 ;login: INVITED TALKS deal about the specific component or first authenticating, and prevents the use SECURITY ON MACOS X service at work. of startup commands (which can make EPORTS the machine act like a FireWire disk or R John Hurley, Apple OS X makes a point of separating be booted into UNIX-permissions-free authorization from authentication, a Summarized by J.D. Welch OS 9, for example). Hurley began by saying that Apple is in move designed for next-generation ONFERENCE an interesting position to deal with secu- applications, including smart card This talk was a little marketing-heavy C rity issues, as they manufacture the access, for which they are developing an and didn’t delve into technical details of hardware, firmware, operating system, SDK (called Smart Card Services) in col- the various systems implemented in OS and often the end application, so a great laboration with HP, Intel, and other ven- X beyond their GUI expression, but it degree of integration is possible in OS X dors. did provide a good introduction to the various services available to the OS X security features. Out of the box, OS X is reasonably well user or administrator. Since OS X is based on BSD, many of the locked down: Services like SSH, HTTP OS X security tools are ports of standard are off by default (but are easy to enable ETHICS FOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS: UNIX tools, oftentimes GUIfied with a – from GUI or command line – if you DILEMMAS FOR LISA 2002 ATTENDEES Cocoa (native OS X Objective-C frame- know what you’re doing), no ports are Lee Damon and Rob Kolstad open, and the root account is disabled work) front end. For example, the Shar- Summarized by Steve Wormley ing and Firewall control panels are a (sudo is used for administrative access). Unlike the medical profession, which has front end to ipfw. OS X also offers Ker- OS X honors UNIX user/group/file per- had thousands of years to develop ethi- beros, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and other missions and is designed to be a multi- cal standards, system administration familiar UNIX tools in its default instal- user OS. ethics are new. The mapping of conven- lation. Obviously, the use of familiar, The Keychain is a cornerstone applica- tional communications such as paper often open source, packages is a depar- tion, and was given much play in this mail and the telephone do not work in ture from (and significant improvement talk. Accessible to all Cocoa, Carbon, the realm of email and Instant Messag- over) OS 9. and UNIX applications running under ing. The quantity of sensitive data online A primary goal in designing the OS X OS X, the Keychain provides an and issues such as identity theft con- security architecture was to make it easy encrypted environment to store pass- tribute to awareness of the need for to use these important features. Addi- words for Web sites and file servers, ethics and privacy guidelines in new tionally, although many tools are pre- encrypted disk volumes, and the like. technology. sented plainly for users, they are con- Users “unlock” the Keychain with a mas- Since computer ethics is a new area, figurable beyond what most users would ter password, and applications can store novel situations and their attendant bother with – good news for longtime and read data from the Keychain. Addi- problems now happen at “Internet UNIX users and security types. Also, tionally, all Keychain items include an speed.”We as system administrators Software Update encourages users to access control list for fine-grained con- need to have knowledge of ethics, pri- keep up-to-date with patches, as it auto- trol. vacy, and security so that we can protect matically polls for and delivers updates Another highlighted technology was the rights and still get work done. directly to end users. ability of Disk Copy, a utility available One definition of a professional is a per- OS X implements a Common Data on all installations of OS X, to create son who conforms to the technical and Security Architecture API, which pro- encrypted disk images. Once the image ethical standards of a profession. For vides an expandable set of crypto algo- is created, it can be mounted (with suc- system administration to be regarded as rithms to various applications, including cessful authentication) read/write, a profession by the outside world, there- the Keychain (encrypted user informa- burned on a CD for transfer, etc. fore, ethical standards need to be tion store) and Disk Copy (which can The physical security of Apple hardware addressed. encrypt disk volumes). These “layered has also been considered. The XServe 1U services” include file signing and certifi- rack mount server, for example, sends A distinction should be made between cate management as well as APIs for messages to the console when physical ethics and policies. Since policies are adding plug-in modules for additional security of the rack is compromised; well defined and generally not open to services. With this modular architecture, other Mac models can be “locked” with interpretation, establishing a site policy developers can make use of security ser- the Open Firmware Password, which will often eliminate many ethical prob- vices without having to know a great prevents booting the machine without lems. February 2003 ;login: LISA XVI G 65 Ethics in the context of computer net- delivered facts and ideas that, if nothing lion dollars made available to NASA works pertain to all privileged users, else, were entertaining. every year and the 300 million the RIAA including anyone with access to others’ loses to “piracy” per year, this figure He isn’t a lawyer – he stressed this fact information, even if that access is acci- clearly indicates there’s something several times – so he approached his dental; even help desk personnel, for severely wrong. Advertising isn’t evil, it’s topic from a “common-sense” angle. example, need to be included. necessary. Rather, the lack of regulation Spam, or Monty Python’s breakfast deli- and control is what constitutes the prob- Lee and Rob went on to present five sce- cacy, is all those emails you never asked lem.