[K12OSN] teaching kids sys admin with VM's

[Robert Arkiletian]

On 1/17/08, Jim Kronebusch <jim at winonacotter.org> wrote:
> Anyhow, I don't think I'd be brave enough to try to run this on my LTSP server.  I guess
> I'd see a VNC connection from the LTSP box to your VM ware server.  I'd put the VM
> server on it's own network headed up by something like IPCop with Block Outgoing Traffic
> installed.  Then you can allow the incoming VNC connections, but use Block Outgoing
> Traffic to block any outgoing ports you want to be certain won't mess with your main
> network.  Then you can block everything from 1023 down except for 80 for net access and
> downloads.  You could then allow them to configure dhcp, apache, nfs, etc, without any
> worries.  You also wouldn't have to worry about them accessing NFS shares on the "real"
> network by becoming root as you can block outgoing and incoming ports for NFS.
>
> A good person to contact would be Jeremy Anderson (jeremy at angelar.com).  He works at
> Hennepin Technical College and helped us host our nclinux.net conference last summer.  I
> think he did exactly what you want to do for his classes.  He used Xen, and built some
> scripts to create the images automatically.  I think he could tell you exactly what you
> need to know for reference on how to set it up and how many VMs can run at once.  I
> think he had a single quad core opteron and was happy with the performance, but I don't
> remember how many were concurrent.
>
> Hope that helps,

Yes it definitely does. I agree a separate box for the VM server
isolated with ipcop would be safest. Nice idea Jim. Thanks for the
contact. I don't want to automate images as I want kids to gain
experience of the install. If this ends up becoming a reality I will
surely report back with my experience.


-- 
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada
Fl_TeacherTool http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/Fl_TeacherTool/
C++ GUI tutorial http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/