Red Hat: RHSA-2011-1249-01 Moderate: MRG Grid Job Scheduling Flaw

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://access.redhat.com/search/ l_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.