Cisco Cisco Email Security Appliance C170 Guia Do Utilizador

A. When a machine joins a cluster, all of that machine's clusterable settings will be inherited from 
the cluster level. Upon joining a cluster, all locally configured non-network settings will be lost, 
overwritten with the settings of the cluster and any associated groups. (This includes the 
user/password table; passwords and users are shared within a cluster).

Q. I have a clustered machine and I remove it (permanently) from the cluster. What happens to my 
settings?

A. When a machine is permanently removed from a cluster, its configuration hierarchy is “flattened” 
such that the machine will continue to work the same as it did when it was part of the cluster. All 
settings that the machine has been inheriting will be applied to the machine in the standalone setting.

For example, if there is only a cluster-mode Global Unsubscribe table, that Global Unsubscribe table 
data will be copied to the machine's local configuration when the machine is removed from the 
cluster.

Q. Are log files aggregated within centrally managed machines? 

A. No. Log files are still retained for each individual machines. The Security Management appliance 
can be used to aggregate mail logs from multiple machines for the purposes of tracking and 
reporting. 

Q. How does User Access work?

A. The Cisco appliances share one database for the entire cluster. In particular, there is only 

admin

 

account (and password) for the entire cluster.

Q. How should I cluster a data center?

A. Ideally, a data center would be a “group” within a cluster, not its own cluster. However, if the data 
centers do not share much between themselves, you may have better results with separate clusters 
for each data center.

Q. What happens if systems are offline and they reconnect?

A. Systems attempt to synchronize upon reconnecting to the cluster. 

Q. Is the centralized management feature a “peer-to-peer” architecture or a “master/slave” architecture?

A. Because every machine has all of the data for all of the machines (including all machine-specific 
settings that it will never use), the centralized management feature can be considered a peer-to-peer 
architecture. 

Q. How do I set up a box so it is not a peer? I want a “slave” system.

A. Creating a true “slave” machine is not possible with this architecture. However, you can disable 
the HTTP (GUI) and SSH (CLI) access at the machine level. In this manner, a machine without GUI 
or CLI access only be configured by clusterconfig commands (that is, it can never be a login host). 
This is similar to having a slave, but the configuration can be defeated by turning on login access 
again. 

Q. Can I create multiple, segmented clusters?

A. Isolated “islands” of clusters are possible; in fact, there may be situations where creating them 
may be beneficial, for example, for performance reasons.