[CLUE-Tech] Hack information

[Eric Jorgensen]

--- "Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at blazenet.net> wrote:

> On Friday 30 July 2004 06:10 pm, Eric Jorgensen
> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I would like to add to the discussion my favorite
> way
> > to deal with the "crack one service, crack my
> whole
> > box" problem:  vservers
> >
> > http://www.linux-vserver.org/
> >
> > With this patched kernel, you can instantiate
> multiple
> > virtual linux machines inside your single physical
> > linux box.  This makes it nice to set up a
> firewall,
> > with ftp in a vserver, smtp and pop in a vserver,
> > httpd in a vserver, all isolated from the others. 
> It
> > is a "chroot jail on steroids".  The one problem
> that
> > I've found is that the releases always seem to lag
> > behind kernel releases substantially.
> >
> > I don't know if it would have helped in this case,
> but
> > I been using it for a while now and I'm very happy
> > with it.
> 
> This sounds kind of interesting,  but it also sounds
> like it would make some 
> nontrivial demands on the hardware,  and I tend to
> use lots of older stuff. 
> Is that the case?
> 


First, let me say that I use a variety of
linux-windows interoperability tools.  I use
Codeweavers Crossover to run Quicken, and it runs very
well.  I also use VMWare, so that I can use MS
specific tools, such as a VPN client, and only have it
affect the virtual machine, not my entire physical
machine.

VMWare is a resource hog, mostly of memory.  It
creates a PC from scratch with virtual hardware in
which you can run windows, linux, qnx, almost
anything.  But because it's a PC within a PC, you do
need at least 256M of memory, and 512M works best. 
But if you think about it, would you want to run
windows xp on a machine with less than 256M?  Probably
not.  So it does seem reasonable, for what it's doing.

I would also put user mode linux (UML) into this same
resource-intensive category. 

However, with linux-vservers, the resource overhead is
quite minimal.  Because you are only using one kernel
and the virtual memory space is shared, it is much
more efficient (though much more limited).  I am
currently running it on a celeron 366 with 128M of
memory.  The vserver is running a tikiwiki server, and
it doesn't run any more slowly that it would running
natively on the hardware.

Hope this helps,

Eric