Re: [owl-users] Openwall and OpenVZ for Student Network Labs and LAMP Setup

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 05:55:08PM +0200, Stephan Holtwisch wrote:
> i am considering setting up an OWL/OpenVZ playground environment for our 
> students (with an X-Server on a Windows machine). I am aware that LAMP 
> needs for programming exercises will most likely be met by installing a 
> RHEL oder CentOS template and by adding the necessary RPMS (the idea is 
> that every students gets a "machine" with root rights, that is easily 
> replacable).

Sounds good.  Please note that precreated templates tend to exclude X
stuff (libraries, etc.), but it is trivial to add with yum or the like.
I have several containers with Fedora and Ubuntu on my development
machine at home, which runs Owl as its host system, and those have the X
client stuff added with yum and apt-get, respectively, with no issues...
except that it was a bit tricky to figure out what font packages to
install when a certain app fails to display some of its messages.

In your case, you will likely need to instantiate a new container from a
precreated template off openvz.org, then add the X client stuff from the
distro's repository, then shutdown the container and create a new
template from it.  This is for you to be able to (re-)create many such
containers easily.

> However since i have no prior experience with OpenVZ i am 
> somewhat concerned about Wireshark lessons. Will students be able to use 
> Wireshark in OpenVZ? And if yes, will there be some unexpected quirks?

Yes, they should be able to.  OpenVZ includes virtualization for raw
sockets, which works well enough for tcpdump (I tested this myself) and
should work for Wireshark as well.

Alexander