(RHSA-2011:1249) Moderate: Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid 2.0 security, bug fix and enhancement update

Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime, and Grid) is a next-generation
IT infrastructure for enterprise computing. MRG offers increased
performance, reliability, interoperability, and faster computing for
enterprise customers.

MRG Grid provides high-throughput computing and enables enterprises to
achieve higher peak computing capacity as well as improved infrastructure
utilization by leveraging their existing technology to build high
performance grids. MRG Grid provides a job-queueing mechanism, scheduling
policy, and a priority scheme, as well as resource monitoring and resource
management. Users submit their jobs to MRG Grid, where they are placed into
a queue. MRG Grid then chooses when and where to run the jobs based upon a
policy, carefully monitors their progress, and ultimately informs the user
upon completion.

A flaw was discovered in Cumin where it would log broker authentication
credentials to the Cumin log file. A local user exploiting this flaw could
connect to the broker outside of Cumin’s control and perform certain
operations such as scheduling jobs, setting attributes on jobs, as well as
holding, releasing or removing jobs. The user could also use this to,
depending on the defined ACLs of the broker, manipulate message queues and
other privileged operations. (CVE-2011-2925)

In addition, these updated packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 provide
numerous bug fixes and enhancements for the Grid component of MRG. Some of
the most important enhancements include:

• Expanded support of EC2 features, including EBS and VPC.

• Improved negotiation performance.

• Reduced shadow memory usage.

• Integrated configuration and management experience, including real-time
  monitoring, diagnostics, and configuration templates.

Release Notes:

• When MRG Grid ran on a node with multiple network interfaces, it tried to
  estimate the correct interface for its communications with the remaining
  MRG Grid nodes. As a consequence, the node could have failed to communicate
  with other parts of MRG Grid correctly if the wrong interface had been
  chosen. As a workaround to this issue, MRG Grid can be forced to use a
  specific network interface by setting the NETWORK_INTERFACE parameter to
  the IP address of that interface. To determine which interface was used by
  MRG Grid when it fails to communicate with other parts of the grid, include
  the D_HOSTNAME variable in the logging configuration of the corresponding
  daemon. (BZ#728285)

• The remote configuration database requires an update to include changes
  for MRG Grid version 2.0.1. But the database snapshot provided with MRG
  only contains a basic configuration, and thus loading the database snapshot
  would replace the existing pool configuration. To solve this issue, the
  upgrade-wallaby-db tool which upgrades an existing deployment’s database
  has to be used. This tool can be downloaded from the following page:
  https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-58404

• With this update, the Elastic Compute Cloud Grid ASCII Helper Protocol
  (EC2 GAHP) is preferred over AMAZON GAHP. The condor-ec2-enhanced-hooks
  package has been updated to detect the correct GAHP for the EC2 Enhanced
  feature based upon what GAHPs are available on the scheduler. To ensure
  that jobs are routed to the proper resources, the 'set_gridresource =
  “amazon”; ' setting should be removed from all existing EC2 Enhanced
  routes in a MRG Grid’s configuration. (BZ#688717)

Space precludes documenting all of these changes in this advisory. Refer to
the Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0 Technical Notes document for information on
these changes:

https://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_MRG/2.0/html/Technical_Notes/index.html

All users of the Grid capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0 are
advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which resolve the issues and
add the enhancements noted in the Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0 Technical
Notes.