Ideas for a cluister; input appreciated.

I have 1 early gen x64 junk laptop, 2 midgrade x64 towers and 1 (what was 3.5 years ago) a highend x64 laptop.

It still needs a lot of hardware TLC. I had to take the oldest laptop apart to clean it and regrease it.

The tower upgrades and the networking stuff set me back about $400 US. It should come out nice once I feel like getting up and doing that much work.

I'm trying to figure out what to do with it after it's built.

If I can get everything to work I'll end up with 18 cores and 20GB RAM running through a highspeed switch with all system resources shared across the distributed units and a 2TB shared storage pool.

I'm planning on using rocks cluster xenroll.

Basic ideas for use:

1) Set it up on my LAN, behind my adaptive firewall, as a virtualized test bed with GNS3 and with emulated switches to build a scale model of a large mixed corporate network.

2) Same setup, except reachable from the outside world via VPN. Then build a thin client and remote in to both my cluster and my "real" machine which has an additional 8 cores and 8GB RAM and harnes their power anywhere I have a wifi connection.

3) Set it up in the gateway's DMZ instead of on the LAN and still set it to only be accessible via VPN.

4) Put it in the DMZ and create a tuntap so it can hit the ouside world directly. I'd set it up kind of like a honey pot. I'd make it look like a mid-size company with the expected activity and I'd put Snort in passive / logging mode and wireshark on the tuntap. That should be the equivalent of setting a sensor just outside the outermost physical network security boundary. I'd have to make sure I isolated it well from all my other systems. But I could record all the hits that a mom and pop store would get and study them.

Continue reading...