A Conversation with David Anderson

[SirUlli]

BOINC

It?s supercomputing on the grassroots level?millions of PCs on desktops at home helping to solve some of the world?s most compute-intensive scientific problems. And it?s an all-volunteer force of PC users, who, with very little effort, can contribute much-needed PC muscle to the scientific and academic communities.

At the forefront of this volunteer-computing effort is David P. Anderson, a research scientist at the U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, where he directs the SETI@home and BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) projects. SETI@home uses hundreds of thousands of home computers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
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http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=313

Sir Ulli

 

[ProviaFan]

Excellent article! Thanks, SirUlli. 😀

 

[RaySun2Be]

Originally posted by: ProviaFan
Excellent article! Thanks, SirUlli. 😀

ditto! 😀

 

[Assimilator1]

Thanks Ulli 🙂

Interesting but somewhat confusing with all the technobabble 😉 ,'sandboxing'?😕 lol

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Assimilator1
'sandboxing'?😕

It may be hard to do on Windows (you'd pretty much need to use VMWare I think), but in at least some Unices and similar systems (Linux), you can set a program up with its own environment. Basically, while it isn't running on a separate virtual system, it does have a small filesystem simulated within a folder on the real filesystem, such that it can't touch anything outside of that virtual filesystem. Other than that, there are other factors that go in to isolating an individual program, but I've never felt so compelled to take my security that far (heck, I run Windows on my main system, so what's the use?). 😉

 

[Wiz]

With Windows services it's a pretty common practice to isolate an entire box to a single service then turn off all ports not expressly needed by that service.
For instance, if you are running a Windows server for email and sql and www you might want 3 boxes - this is especially handy when applying patches, upgrades, hotfixes. You don't bring down all the other services just to patch one.

That being said, with good old NT4 it's not difficult to choose software that doesn't interfere with the other servers on the box - I'm not talking about MSFT servers here of course.
It's not hard to set up MS SQL server, a third party email program and a third party www server on one box and keep them secure even with multiple users (multiple hosting accounts).

However, if you expect to use Windows 2003 server, Exchange server, MS SQL & IIS on one box you will probably be in for some troublesome nights. Oh, and pack a lot of memory - you'll need it.

 

[amdxborg]

Very interesting article! Thanx SirUlli! 😀