N3RdZone - Using and Abusing Tech

[feck]

Questions? Answers? Hints Tricks Tips about your datacenter, network, laptop or phone?

Good spot, no?


I'll start -

VirtualBox is not just fun, it's grown up enough to be "Enterprise Virtualization". Just about anyone can get started with it in about 20 minutes, and an average sysadmin can deploy it on a couple hundred cores with surprisingly low overhead in a couple days of experimenting.

I like to run it "Headless" and find VBox's CLI to be both intuitive, and friendly. The switches and knobs provided in a terminal give me more control over the VM, and VBoxHeadless combined with rdesktop or Windows RDP is just about as "light" as other, more complicated, techs. That, and I'm OK with terminals.
But I don't "need" to look at a terminal window to have fun with VBox. The GUI is pretty much self explanatory.

If you haven't at least played around with virt yet, VirtualBox is a rewarding way to start, and there's lots of info from a large user base on the Web, so you can learn almost as fast as you'd like...

To make it almost effortless, try importing a virtual appliance from TurnKey Linux .
Their OVF files make creating your first VM as easy as RtClick>Unzip >RtClick "Open With VirtualBox".

And, if or when you want, you can mirror, backup, or just plain mount your TurnKey VM on Amazon EC3 for pennies.

cheers!

[feck]

^^^ posted from a VBox VM

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# uname -a

Linux Oracle6.2 2.6.32-300.3.1.el6uek.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Dec 9 18:57:35 EST 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

that runs on an W2K8 server in another location far from where I am sitting. Feels "Native" except for video, which sux.

Upside is that Xen and Linux Containers both work in this guest, which is Inception-tier computer science happening on VBox but not Hyper-V (yet).

[Zack Morris]

Does VirtualBox expose an API that can be hooked for very fine-grained control of what's going on inside of it?

[feck]

Does VirtualBox expose an API that can be hooked for very fine-grained control of what's going on inside of it?

Aye, moreover, the bulk of the code is GPL'd and all the userland components are frontends to the main API.


https://www.virtualbox.org/sdkref/index.html

There's Lots of other tricks too, both on host and guest side.

[feck]

VBox also does "advanced" sysadmin trix, like hotswapping CPUs and disk drives, Teleporting running VMs to new hardware, and some pretty advanced clustering, both for failover and raw application server power.

I have a VM which started life as a little mainframe and has since grown into quite the little SC.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middl ... index.html



With C/C++, COBOL, ForTran, JavaEE, and P-Language development enviros out of the box, the VM gives a programmer the tools to build and implement say, Steam (and the games, and the ERP that monitors the BigBoard public corporation...)

SALT (Services Architecture Leveraging Tux) makes firing off 16 clustered databases and application servers as easy as

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~$ tmboot -y

then logging in to tSALT from a browser.
Page 2 of "Getting Started" has you deliberately destroying several servers and timing how long it takes them to right themselves and get back to work after you throw a few #rm -r * 's into the databases of your fancy little distributed clusters.
Self-repairing machines. Nifty stuff that.
It's why I named it "ACME_Liquid_Hole"

[feck]

I luvs me sum Opera Browser

a 9-15meg browser that's like Firefox with:
NoScript (Not quite... but javascript control/validation is fairly fine-grained in Opera, so most Opera users don't feel like they need NoScript )
BetterPrivacy
User Agent Switcher
GreaseMonkey (Run any valid Greasemonkey script or CSS script in Opera)
FoxyProxy and a semi transparent proxy off site (Opera Turbo)
SideBar Menu (pinning FF menus to the side is a poor substitute)
a couple of Tab extensions (Opera has the BEST tabs)
a very good Pastebin/Tomboy extension that's private, and syncs your notes across platforms (Notes)
Thunderbird running inside Firefox (Opera Mail)
a NATed nginX or lighthttpd...let's just say Tomcat web server running inside a sandbox, fed from a hopped-up sqlite database in another sandbox, on Thunderbird to handle those big attachments, like 10gigabyte+ files (Opera Unite)
a built in Elinks, LynX, Elynx link-based protobrowser (Links)
Firebug and no less than 7 Firebug plugins/hacktools (Opera DragonFly)
A Very good Speed Dial extension

get all that going, and you have a Firefox that approximates a default Opera

Opera's a tank because you don't need so many addons, and they build it to be a tank. It's usually the at or near the top of security rankings, and it typically doesn't leak memory unless it hangs a connection. It's as solid in my environments after a 10-20 day session as a fresh boot. Can't say same for other major browsers.

Opera gets a little slow to boot (comparatively) with 20 IMAP and RSS accounts and 100k headers, but browsing stays fast because, again, you don't need nearly as many addons as FF, or Chrome. It's built in.


High Function.

[Sparky]

Gentlemen, behold!


A credit card sized computer for $25.
A cheap assed HTPC!
An ultra low powered torrent / file / print / DNS server!
The brains inside your inexpensive [GENERIC_TOKYO_DESTROYING_ROBOT_IDEA]!
The controller of your very own CNC droid factory!
It also dun can get your childrens edjumacted!
etc. etc.

A Wallace and Grommet style wonderland/Batcave is now within the price range of the common man.

[Miss_Faucie_Fishtits]

Ô_Ô".......... I....... wants one.......

[Azrael]

So do I. Somebody out to write Utilizing Raspberry Pi for Dummies so us non-geniuses (I'm speaking for myself here, not anyone else on the thread) can have fun, too.

Speaking of Using and Abusing Tech . . .



This is what happens when you hot-link an image.

[noddy]

Gentlemen, behold!


A credit card sized computer for $25.
A cheap assed HTPC!
An ultra low powered torrent / file / print / DNS server!
The brains inside your inexpensive [GENERIC_TOKYO_DESTROYING_ROBOT_IDEA]!
The controller of your very own CNC droid factory!
It also dun can get your childrens edjumacted!
etc. etc.

A Wallace and Grommet style wonderland/Batcave is now within the price range of the common man.

funny you post this - my friend has been buggin me to get into it for several weeks now...
the perfect thing for a hacking features in as you think of them

[noddy]

So do I. Somebody out to write Utilizing Raspberry Pi for Dummies so us non-geniuses (I'm speaking for myself here, not anyone else on the thread) can have fun, too.

feck posted how to setup a linux vm and these little buggers run a small linux, so first step is already documented

normally for this kind of gadget you would need to be handy with a soldering iron and machine code, arduino took away the machine code and this takes away the soldering iron.

they are using python as their main scripting language (yay!) so the learning curve is asbout as gentle as it gets - i see their are also introductory videos for it on youtube (search for: raspberry pi python)

http://www.raspberrypiforum.com/

[Azrael]

Wow! Well, if anyone here does anything with this, I'd like to know. I would imagine that it could be very useful.

[Odin!]

Gentlemen, behold!


A credit card sized computer for $25.
A cheap assed HTPC!
An ultra low powered torrent / file / print / DNS server!
The brains inside your inexpensive [GENERIC_TOKYO_DESTROYING_ROBOT_IDEA]!
The controller of your very own CNC droid factory!
It also dun can get your childrens edjumacted!
etc. etc.

A Wallace and Grommet style wonderland/Batcave is now within the price range of the common man.

>9/10, would hit


$25 stereo head unit. $25 hardware firewall router or VPN appliance with enough features to support an office of 25 users.

This open horizons. This is cool.

[noddy]

http://opensource.com/health/12/1/open- ... 000U4nZAAS

Would you enjoy reprogramming lab bacteria with DNA from a jellyfish to make them glow green? How about hacking your own genetic data to find out what percentage of the Neanderthal genome you share? Or building a device that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen?

If so, maybe you should consider joining the DIY garage biology movement.

[Sparky]

Gahh. Sold out in minutes. On they waiting list for the next run. In the meantime, this looks like an excellent idea. Worth porting to the Pi.