chroot breakout (was: Xen 2.0 Virtual Machine)

[Brian Kelsay]

jeremy at linuxwebguy.com wrote:

> See also http://www.redwoodvirtual.com.  They offer root accounts in a
> UML environment.  I don't work for them nor am I a customer.  Though I
> am thinking of playing with the idea in case I wanted to venture into
> web hosting.  I'm always up for learning something new anyway!
> 
> I was a bit ambiguous earlier in the thread when I said "virtual
> environment."  My main goal would be to run Linux on Linux, as close to
> hardware as I can get for the purpose of testing other Linux distributions.  
> Recently I installed several Linux distros to get screenshots of how to 
> update that specific distro.  I used spare space on my hard drive for
> the installs, but then I had to worry about uids and gids and mounting
> the other partitions correctly so I could save off the screenshots.  Not
> a big deal, but if I am going do more of this, I'd like to run the
> distros as a VM and mount /home via NFS, and authenticate via
> OpenLDAP+PAM.

I've run into a bit of these problems while messing with LiveCDs.  Most 
allow you to mount partitions as read only, so how do you save your 
screenshots?  From the commandline, in a root xterm, you "mount -rw 
/dev/hdax /mnt/hdax" where x is the partition number.  If it is fat16 or 
32, you can add "-t vfat" after the mount and before the partition info, 
for ntfs you use "-t ntfs" but you can't do read-write.  Actually you 
can now if you use the captive NTFS driver, but that's another 
lesson/headache.  As for UIDs and GIDs I'd be interested in how you 
solved this.


-- 
----------------------------------------------
Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.