Argh…. I’m still fighting with trying to get User Mode Linux going. I think I must have rebuilt my kernel about a dozen times trying different options to get it going, but only a small amount of success. I now can build the kernel (yay) but it backgrounds itself (forking?) immediately on starting and then segfaults when I bring it to the foreground (boo).
UML is a pretty cool project that’s starting to come up more and more lately. Basically it allows you to boot a Linux kernel from the command line and have a complete virtual machine running under an existing Linux install. This is similar to what VMWare does but it doesn’t require a GUI or X environment to be running. It can be used as a Honeypot or for doing virtual hosting. I’m wondering if it might be something I can do to give some of my users on UFies.org their “own” machine to play with. They get to do whatever they want with it because as far as they are concerned, it’s a server unto itself, and they can have root access, install packages, install a different distro on there…. whatever they want.
And I can destroy it all by simply deleting their virtual machine’s disk file… muahahahahahah.
Not that I’d ever do that of course 🙂
It might not be realistic as far as disk space requirements go, as each virtual machine has to have a distro installed in it, and all the user files take up space and everything. However, it’s fun to play with. This would probably have been a great thing to have back in the NetMaster/Merilus days for playing with router/firewall/vpn senarios.
Back to compiling…