We're trying out HQueue and admiring its job management features.

However, I'm wondering about access control and security. It looks as though anything that can connect to the server's port 5000 can submit an arbitrary shell command job. Though it runs as hquser, it would have access to lots of things.

Of course we can use a firewall to limit access to the server, but this still makes me very uneasy. Before this, we'd been using an ssh-based homegrown job distribution setup – much less capable than HQueue, but we knew that a job could only be run by someone using one of our login accounts, rather than by anyone attached to our network.

Am I missing something? Is there provision for enabling some safe user-based access control for HQueue?

Followup: I talked with SideFX support. They may eventually release a version of HQueue which does have some sort of access control, but for now, it doesn't have any.

If you use HQueue, please beware: anyone on the network who can connect to TCP port 5000 on your HQueue server can submit jobs to your render farm. And those jobs can run any command, not just Houdini scene processing.

So, make sure your HQueue server's port 5000 is (at least) not accessible to the general Internet! It is handy to be able to check the status of jobs, etc. from anywhere - it's not obvious that this is also risky.


I urged SideFX to at least warn people at installation time about the need for firewalling the server. They've filed RFE #89564 to add such a warning. Thank you, support people!