Savannah W-ITS

VirtualBox Security Tools – testing or installing Live CD images as virtual machines
I noted that this seems to be a popular approach for VMWare images and decided to try a few tools out using VirtualBox.   As with any such ’security solution’ you should carefully evaluate the tools that you allow (or the OS builds that you [...]

Some relatively new Linux documents that should be reviewed:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/security-guide/ – an introduction to system security for Linux systems.

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/selinux-user-guide/ – the MISSING document! One of the challenges with SELINUX has always been a lack of adequate documentation.  SELINUX has been a pain since it was introduced – things ‘quit working’ and after some period of [...]

Ok, you made YAW (yet another whoops!) and need a fix but you don’t quite recall the tool or the steps needed – you just need a quick ‘refresh’…
The (Linux) system is not boot-able.  If you are using the Grub boot-loader, then one possible approach to fixing/restoring normal boot:

Boot from the Linux release CD/DVD into [...]

I expect things to improve when I update/upgrade software – whether it is a commercial product OR if it is an Open Source product.
Sadly, my VirtualBox installation is ‘broken’ after upgrading to version 2.1.2 (from version 2.0.6.)  Note that my VirtualBox VMs will still boot, but those that used Host Interface Networking no longer have [...]

CMS=Content Management System
Rails = Ruby on Rails – a development framework using the Ruby language, Active Record, and Restful programming.
VDI – virtual disk image (Sun Virtualbox virtual machine solution)
Zena is described as a state of the art CMS “with a focus on usability, ease of customization and web 2.0 goodness (application like behaviour).”  There are [...]

I get vendor emails on a daily basis – I usually ignore the web links that they contain…

Today, I accepted the invitation to visit Sun’s Web site.  While there, I happened upon an Open Solaris VDI download (~2GB compressed image.)  After downloading just uncompress, import into your VDI disk image selections, create a new Open Solaris type virtual machine (VM) and

Start by creating your virtual machine image (including installing your OS of choice) – in my example this is Source.VDI.

Duplicating a virtual machine (VM) image with Virtualbox is simple but requires using the command line:

VBoxManage clonevdi  Source.VDI  New_clone.VDI

The time required to clone a VirtualBox image (VDI) is  dependant upon the size of the your VDI image and the processing power of your computer system.  The cloning process  creates

I first looked at virtualization several years ago – it was beyond, or rather the hardware was beyond my exploration budget so I moved on. Current PCs under ~$1000 are quite capable of running multiple OS instances (especially with new VM-aware CPUs and an adequate amount of RAM and disk space; my 6 GB system can run a primary OS using ~1GB or less of RAM (under Linux) and ~2GB of RAM (under Vista.)

After flipping between Vista (64 bit) and Fedora 8/9 I find that:

• Virtual Box under Vista integrates well but performance is somewhat less robust than when running similar VMs under Linux;  but hardware issues (specifically USB device sharing) seem to work well under Vista.
• Creating an NTFS native partition (or two) is quite useful if there is a need to share data across OS instances or when running under different primary hosts

Cobbler – a provisioning system for Linux or other OS builds

Virtual Box – A virtual machine (VM) management suite (packaged by Sun)

Just a few years ago the hardware in computer systems (PCs and servers) tended to contain quite a number of proprietary components which required special treatment/drivers/setup-configuration to create a functional and useful system.  The build process tended to be time consuming and was typically customized based