Virtual PC and Linux

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: scottws
Sweet. I got Debian base reinstalled, installed ssh-krb5, and installed the vmware-server and mui. As Brazen said, the management console is key here. Works like a champ. I'm currently installing Debian on the virtual machine which will become the fileserver.

Edit: Man, this HP machine is barely cutting it. So drag was definately right there. CPU seems to be most important. I've only got 640MB of memory, but the VMWare server is only using 120MB of it. However, I'm utilizing like 90% of the CPU at times, and usually 40% or above.

Edit 2: Any tips on hardening both the host system and the virtual guest? Both on Debian.

For instance on the host, I'd like to close all ports except 22, 902, and 8333. But I don't think a firewall is installed. I also don't know if I did that if it would affect the guest.

You could also close all ports but 22 and use ssh to tunnel everything but that may be a bit eccentric. As far as performance, is that even after installation? When I'm installing the OS, the performance is usually maxed out, but once I have a linux machine running idle, serving webpages or databases, or whatever, the performance impact is practically nill.

 

[scottws]

Yeah, the CPU utilization went way down after the installation was complete.

Too bad I don't have a bigger hard drive in the HP. I'd move on to setting up a LAMP server or something.

 

[scottws]

Originally posted by: Brazen
as far as setting up the firewall, install Webmin, on both the host and the guest. It is super easy to administer the firewall from Webmin. You can probably apt-get webmin onto the machine and then login from a web browser to port 10000 with your root account.

Well...

I apt-get installed webmin, which installed four other packages. Attempting to access the server remotely on port 10000 over https resulted in:

Error - Access denied for <my IP address>.

I tried looking for help, but it seems that webmin is a web front-end for lots of different programs, and is not in and of itself a firewall with a web interface. So yeah, I don't know what to do.

 

[Brazen]

try just http

I'm afraid I can't help you much though when it comes to Debian.

 

[scottws]

I figured it out.

First I needed the webmin-firewall package to let webmin manage the iptables firewall.

Then I had to connect to the VMWare server's IP address on port 10000 from the server itself. I installed the Lynx browser to accomplish this. Basically, by default, webmin is set to only allow the loopback address to connect to it. I added my workstation's IP address as an allowed address, and then it worked fine when trying to connect from my workstation.

Now to learn how this firewall works...