[K12OSN] Virtual Machine Advice

[John Lucas]

On Tuesday 27 February 2007 15:31, lmcpherson wrote:
> I use a Dell D600 laptop with Ubuntu 6.10 as the host and VMware
> workstation - Win98 & WinXP clients.  When I'm working wireless, Ubuntu
> does not pass on the parameters to the VM - (WIN98 & WINXP Clients).
> The wired connections works great - and I can use a share folder that
> all OSs can access.  I also loaded Ubuntu Server 6.10 as a client -- but
> it continually crashes.
>

A little off topic, but if you put your virtual machines on the NAT network, 
the virtual machines can use the net whether you use wired or wifi networking 
on the host (the virtual machines always use their virtual ethernet NICs).

I am using Fedora Core 6 on a Dell Inspiron 6400 as the host, with VMPlayer (I 
build the virtual machines with VMServer on my desktop and move them to the 
Laptop). I actually have a virtual network running on the host-only and NAT 
networks:

	- K12LTSP-5 server (also does DHCP for host-only net)
	- IPCop with URL filter (firewall between host-only and NAT nets)
	- PXE diskless workstation (boots from virtual LTSP server on host-only net)

I wanted to be able to demonstrate FLOSS/Thin-client computing even if I had 
no physical network. Now the only thing I need is an LCD projector and an 
audience to demo LTSP and IPCop :-} BTW the virtual diskless terminal uses 
networked sound and local USB storage too.

The other virtual demo setup I have (on the same laptop) is a virtual Windows 
XP Pro workstation, established on an NT-style domain via a 
Fedora/Samba/OpenLDAP server (set up with the wonderful smbldap-installer 
script). I'm starting to integrate FreeRADIUS to this to test secure WiFi 
infrastructure using all OSS (I have only just started this).

I can't run both demos at once (I don't have enough RAM), but I still think 
this is an effective platform for system integration testing and 
demonstration. 

Sharing the same folder among all virtual machines should be easily 
accomplished by running Samba on the host system and creating shares that can 
be accessed on the host-only and NAT networks (the virtual NICs are already 
there with VMPlayer/VMServer).

-- 
        "History doesn't repeat itself; at best it rhymes."
                        - Mark Twain

| John Lucas                          MrJohnLucas at gmail.com               |
| St. Thomas, VI 00802                http://mrjohnlucas.googlepages.com/ |
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