The VM CLone War...

= The VM Clone War =
Lately, the LUX team has been using VM a lot. And I think half of us are using Virtual Box. And we have to setup a network with VMs. Instead of installing your system one by one, you can actually clone you hard disk and add another vm. On my beloved LUX-ers requested, here is how your clone your vm HD.


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1. First, clone your hard disk with VBoxManage command
VBoxManage clonehd /media/NesEeeStorage/VMs/vm-Fedora10c.vdi /media/NesEeeStorage/VMs/vm-Fedora10a.vdi

2. Add your new vm with a different name.
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Here is the capture....
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[bossanesta@NesEeeF10 VMs]$ VBoxManage clonehd /media/NesEeeStorage/VMs/vm-Fedora10c.vdi /media/NesEeeStorage/VMs/vm-Fedora10a.vdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 2.1.2
(C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...
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=== NOTES ===

= if your VM's HDs are in different path =
The VBoxManage is kinda weired. When you run it, it will only search vm's harddisks in default path. So, if you changed your vm location like I do. Use full path just like me.

= creating VM with command
You can do it in GUI mode or.. if you wanna be a VBox-Guru, try "VBoxManage create". "man VBoxManage" is your friend.

= about VM networking
I've been trying to create a VM network. well.. got a lot of trouble.. @@ but i found there is a typo in VBox's office tutorial . It drove me crazy, cos I didn't expect a simple mistake from an official site while a lot of people I know got help from that page. So, I was trying to yum install this and yum install that.. My ubuntu's vbox is not working now, cos somehow I got a wrong version of vbox. Anyway, here is the typo....

PATH=/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin <== the last one should be "/usr/sbin".

= It's cross platform!
Do not forget that VBox is cross platform! It means, If you have a dual or tri or quad boot like me, you can run your VM in Linux, Windows, Solaris, OSX!! That's the reason why I'm using it instead of KVM althought KVM provide a better control.

= Cloning is good news for lazy sys admin
It's always good to keep a copy of your VM. Because if you don't have enough time to trouble shot your VM and things happened. You can always go back to the one your clone before. I have been using VM for 1 months, created over 10 VMs so far in 3 tri-boot laptops. And I found that sometime the VM's hd got problem if you restart a lot. And I always just use another one, cos it's faster than scanning the HD.

= DO NOT UPGRADE!!! =
I not a big fans of auto update. First newer dosen't mean better, second, you may have a big chance that things are not working. That including linux kernel and vbox. When I was trying to install VBoxManage, I downloaded the package from repo.. and.. my vbox dosen't work any more. I guess it happened to Mohak(vyas) also. And he used the windows way to fix this linux problem --> uninstall and install. And it worked... @@ Looks like I'll do the same thing... I'm putting this in the last point, cos I dun want ppl know that I'm using the "windows way" to trouble shot.. and u know.. ususally people dun even bother read the whole blog. ;-p

A Emtional FreeBSD in VM, with bad temper...

I've been trying to install FreeBSD in Virtual Machine since week 1. The first few times, I was stuck in how to install it. Yeah.. i guess I get to used to "next-and-next" installations. The concept in FreeBSD is totally different.

Some how I managed to find a simple installation guide for FreeBSD. Obviously the official guide didn't help me. So, I managed to install in a Toshiba Laptop which runs a Intel Celeron M CPU.

And a hardworking student like me, of course, won't be proud of using a step by step installation. So, I tried to install in another Compaq laptop which has an Intel Dual Core CPU. And I even learned more the installation procedure. In BSD, every thing is manual. If you miss a step, you may end up installing nothing but with an error in your boot loader. And somehow the standard FreeBSD bootloader never work for me. I had to use MBR instead. Of course, I've got no clue why...

Interestingly, FreeBSD crashes all the time in my VM. Even I tried to install few times, because I thought I did something wrong during installations. Anyway, re-installing didn't work. It just shutdown itself during boot. But I could to safe mode.

Then I talked with my classmates, Milton. Miltan said he had simular problem, but it worked after he restarted. Well.. not in my case, I tried restart few times, went to safe mode and restart.. no.. didn't work.

Right now, when I'm just about to turn it on and tried to capture a screen shot of its dead-look and also check the logs. It works!!! @@ tried init 6, restart... still works...

I've got no clue at all. I guess maybe it's because of I changed the NIC and I had to install the driver. I'll try to change the NIC again and see what will happens.

I tried it on Friday for the whole day, 7 hours!!! not mentioning other time I put in. What have I done to deserve this? ;-p

Disable root ssh...

I've been wanted to run my own testing server. Finally, I set it up today. Sign up an account in DynDNS.com. Set up some setting in my wifi router so it can update my dynamic IP regular. After some configuration, that's it! It was like 10mins work. ssh works, tunneling works, sftp works.. nice!

But of course, having a server that would let people connect to it is quite dangerous. Especially, it's my home network. I was lucky enough to see Professor Raymond Chan online.. oh.. i'm not gonna miss the chance, right? SO, I asked him the best way to setup the iptables. So, I drop all incoming, except ssh port. I'm gonna open port 80 so I can play apache server a bit. ^^ And on my router side, I set more security options in my router. I may setup a VPN or something, just incase if someone hack into my server. They can't access some of my Windows machine.

Then, did some testing from different network... from cdot machines, from my iPhone.. cool.. it worked! But connecting from iPhone needs some trick. The trick is have to make sure the iPhone has an IP first. It's kinda weired...

When I was testing the login, I almost forgot to test if I could ssh with root.. oh.. yeah.. gotta disable it. 30second search on net, found the disable root login. I would love to share with any one...

= First, make sure u have root privilege, u can either use "sudo" or "su -".. then...
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
= find the following line.. remove "#" and change "yes" to "no"
PermitRootLogin no
= save and test!!

That's it!

At this point, I'm not sure what I'll be testing on it.. Apache, of course.. I may set up a small Beowulf cluster if it's possible. I hope I'll able to run VM in this machine.. but this machine is only like 700mhz AMD CPU with 512 ram.. it'd be really slow to run VM.

Ideally, I should put this server in front of my home network. Set it as a router with strong firewall protection, put my home network be hide it. I don't have a real plan for this yet... Lets see if I have time for it... ^^