PS:
Hi Marco - I was wondering/hoping you might weigh in on a few follow ups?
1) I downloaded the VM
(http://www.postcogito.org/vsdemo0.5-ubuntu10_04-32bit.7z ) and it runs,
but am unsure what I should look for. Within the Ubuntu VM, a message
comes up (Welcome to Kiko's 'Vservers on the Desktop' Demo!", and there
are a number of links in the upper panel to Firefox, Corporate Firefox,
LibreOffice etc. The pw allows me to get root access, but as best I
can tell the vserver is not using an LV. Can you throw me a tip as to
what I might look for to see how you configured partitions etc.?
2) My Linux Vserver clones take about 10 min to complete...my
impression is yours get completed much more quickly. Is that possibly
because I'm not using hashify, have a slower machine, or have a larger
vserver to clone (with the Mate desktop etc.)?
3) I've been looking at "kpartx" as a way to create nested LVMs,
assuming I'd clone a new Vserver, create some nested LVMS, and then move
the Vserver's "/home" to one nested LVM and everything else to another
(my assumption being this may not work but am experimenting...). Do you
use "kpartx" in your work, or some other approach when creating nested
LVMs? When I issue something like "kpartx -av /dev/vg2/LVM" I get no
output on the command line and so am wondering if kpartx works with my
set up (Encrypted RAID, LVM, Wheezy).
If you have a chance....thanks for the help!
On 02/04/14 07:51, Marco Carnut wrote:
> Hi Ted,
>
>
>> I'm using Vserver guests, each within its own LVM (Wheezy with Mate,
>> LibreOffice, Firefox etc.) I'm using LVM as a means to manage each
>> guest's space.
>>
>> I've been experimenting with LVM snapshots as a way to restore a guest
>> quickly should it became compromised from an attacker. Initial
>> experiments show the restores go quickly, though I have only run a few
>> tests (i.e., the snapshots restore more quickly than building a standard
>> guest from template).
>>
>> Q: has anyone using guests in LVMs put /home in one logical volume and
>> rest of the of the guest in another? Can you use nested LVMs for
>> Vserver guests?
>>
> I used to do that with no problem for years. The
> downside is that you'll have to mount several
> filesystems, so you won't be able to benefit from
> unification. I also recommend using a filesystem
> fast mounts and little need of frequent fsck's.
> I used reiserfs in that capacity for many years
> with zero incidents. xfs seems to work fine.
> In more recent kernels I've been favoring btrfs.
>
> Lately I've been using everything in one filesystem
> so I can benefit from unification, using vserver ... build's clone
> method. It's considerably slower than
> snapshotting/mounting, but still takes just a few
> seconds (if you're using SSDs it's even faster),
> but you can cram a lot of vservers in an otherwise
> modest machine.
>
> A few years ago I even made a live demo of the whole
> concept as a VMware virtual machine (it plays fine
> in VirtualBox as well) using and old Ubuntu LTS,
> if you don't mind downloading 1.5GB of data:
>
> http://www.postcogito.org/vsdemo0.5-ubuntu10_04-32bit.7z
> (the guest user's password is 'demovs')
>
>
>> My thought here is that you could use snapshots to restore the guest's
>> system to a "pristine" state without having to restore /home and its
>> data, or have the choice to restore /home vs. the rest of the guests
>> from separate snapshots.
>>
> That is roughly the concept this demo implements,
> although in this case we restore everything, not
> only /home.
>
> A few years back I tried to gather people to try and
> make a distro out of this concept, but at the time
> there was little interest.
>
> --Marco "Kiko" Carnut
> --Tempest Security Intelligence -- www.tempestsi.com
>
>
>
Received on Wed Feb 5 19:56:37 2014