[GTALUG] Fwd: Living in Virtual Machines

Giles Orr gilesorr at gmail.com
Thu Jul 2 19:38:29 UTC 2015


Forwarded from Jamon, with a similar idea to Daniel's.  I looked at
containers and haven't totally ruled it out, but I think I prefer full
OS installs.  Obviously containers would use a lot less hard drive
space, but full virtualization offers more isolation.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jamon Camisso
Date: 2 July 2015 at 15:14
Subject: Re: [GTALUG] Living in Virtual Machines

Hey top posting from an email that isn't able to post to tlug ... feel
free to forward this link to the list if you like:

https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/

Using docker's volumes feature to bind mount directories and files into
a container allows things like running Xorg, with persistent writes to
shared files. No NFS needed even.

Jamon

On 07/02/2015 12:09 PM, Giles Orr wrote:
> I have this idea that's been slowly forming in my head.  I wanted to
> run it by TLUG for opinions to find out if I'm totally crazy or if it
> might work.
>
> I hope to set up my desktop (and probably my laptop as well) to have a
> Debian stable base OS - about as stripped as I can manage, just X with
> a lightweight window manager (probably OpenBox).  On top of that would
> be VirtualBox, the idea being to run all my applications from virtual
> machines.
>
> Since I'd have multiple machines accessing the same /home/, I'd want
> NFS.  That could be run by the host OS, but I was thinking about using
> OpenWRT as the NFS server.  But that immediately runs into a
> difficulty: it appears that getting the VirtualBox Guest Additions
> running in OpenWRT is (very?) difficult, so I'd probably have to use
> raw partition access.  The problem with that is that if the partition
> is accessed simultaneously by any application on the host OS, you can
> munge the partition.
>
> I'm also planning on running another OpenWRT instance: this would be
> used for routing, with all the other virtual machines going through it
> to access the outside world.  Among other things, that would mean I
> only have to administer a firewall in one place.  One idea I'm still
> considering is giving full control of the network card to the OpenWRT
> instance and making the host OS go through OpenWRT to get to the
> outside world ...
>
> This could all probably be done with KVM rather than VirtualBox, but I
> prefer VB not only because I'm more familiar with it, but also because
> .VDI disc images can vary in size (Qemu's .qcow2 image format are
> fixed size) and because VirtualBox handles full screen display of OSes
> better (at least once Guest Additions is installed).  I'm happy to
> listen to reasons in favour of KVM.
>
> Other virtual machines would include TinyCore, SliTaz, and Debian
> Stretch.  The latter would probably be my primary OS.  The thought was
> to ssh from the host OS to the guest with X forwarding, and then run a
> launcher from the guest on the host so any applications run from the
> launcher were from the guest.
>
> Advantages:
> - I get to tinker with multiple OSes (something I enjoy)
> - if I'm about to go to a dubious website, I can clone a virtual
> machine, use it for the dubious visit, then destroy it
>
> Disadvantages that I've thought of so far:
> - memory usage
> - speed reduction
> - hard drive usage for disk images
> - complexity
> - mounting USB sticks on guests is extremely problematic
> - playing sound/video from guests through the host is imperfect
> - hard to determine where an application is running from
>
> I'm sure there are many, many other problems with this idea.  Go to
> town, that's why I'm here.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com


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