On 8/20/10 7:58 AM, Simon King wrote:
Dear Jason,
On Aug 20, 3:35 pm, Jason Grout<[email protected]> wrote:
If you (a) have an entire machine dedicated to the Sage server, and are
okay with rebuilding the machine if something malicious happens, or (b)
trust the students enough that you would give them accounts on the
machine anyway, then no, you don't need VirtualBox (and in fact, I
believe it will be faster if you don't use it).
The machine is not entirely dedicated to the Sage server, but
currently is so rarely used that my boss said I should use it. And I
don't know the students, so, I don't know if I trust them. On the
other hand, setting up a virtual machine is probably something that I
have to discuss with our computer services (which tend to be slow and
tend to ignore Linux -- their FAQ only mention Windows and Apple
Macintosh).
You would maybe need to get a new IP address for the virtual machine,
for example.
What is the advantage of having a virtual machine? Do I understand
correctly that using a virtual machine it is possible to restrict
user's rights much more than with an account on that machine?
Yes, in the sense that the virtual machine is separated from the
original machine. In a sense, you are creating a sandbox that the
students can do their work in. However, at any time, you can throw the
sandbox, reset it to a previous known state, etc. It would be very,
very difficult (i.e., I consider it "impossible", but of course, those
are famous last words!) for a student to escape the virtual machine
sandbox and get into the original machine (as far as I understand).
Is it possible to guarantee that there always are at least, say, 6 GB
of memory available to the virtual machine (so that there is enough
memory for the students even if other users work on the machine)?
I think this is possible, but I don't know how to guarantee 6 GB from
the host. I think most of the time, people are concerned with limiting
the resources the virtual machine consumes, rather than guaranteeing the
resources.
Jason
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