My virtual linux server

In the windows installation on my laptop, I also run a linux server in background. Here is how I setup my virtual linux server.

As a virtualization software I installed Sun VirtualBox. I created a virtual machine. I gave it a little less than the half of my memory and turned on support for AMD-V extensions (as I did also in my host machine BIOS). As HD controller I selected SATA (the default is IDE). For networking I use the NAT configuration. I forwarded the SSH port as described in the virtual box manual (backlinux is the name of my virtual machine):

VBoxManage setextradata "backlinux" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/Protocol" TCP
VBoxManage setextradata "backlinux" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/GuestPort" 22
VBoxManage setextradata "backlinux" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/HostPort" 2222

Then I followed the suggestion of Sebastian Bauer's blog: I installed the ntwind software's hidden start tool (homepage) and created two one-liner batch files that I use to start and stop the virtual machine. There are also more sofisticated approaches to run the machine as a windows service, however I found this very simple and I chose it for this reason.

Here is the start.bat file: (paths are specific to my machine)

"c:\Program Files\standalone\hstart\hstart" /NOCONSOLE ""c:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox\vboxheadless" -s backlinux -vrdp off"

while the stop.bat file contains:

"c:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" controlvm backlinux savestate

I created two hard disk images for the machine, called backlinux.vdi and backlinux.home.vdi. I set both to dynamical 8 Gb. I later attached backlinux.home to /home. I keep /home on a separate disk, so that I can make use of the snapshots feature of Virtualbox, without loosing the data in /home. To do this I changed the type of backlinux.home.vdi to write-through using:

"c:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" modifyhd backlinux.home.vdi --type writethrough

Then I installed ubuntu-server (jaunty, i.e. 9.04) with the option "minimal virtual machine" (press F4 by the installation) and I added some software packages I need/like using aptitude (for example: libncurses-dev, libcairo2-dev, ruby1.9, git-core, gitk ... and relative dependences). The machine has no x-server installed, but I have an X server installed under Windows (Xming), so I can start also graphical software using X-forwarding.

To allow the virtual machine to access the host disk (C:), I installed the VBoxLinuxGuestAdditions from the shell script in the virtual CD image (.iso) provided with virtual box (you need to install linux-headers package for your kernel for that). Then I created a shared folder "c" using the virtual box gui. In Linux then I mounted the folder, creating a /C folder, adding this line to /etc/fstab:

c    /C    vboxsf

As last step, I created two icons starting from NewTux.svg of Wikimedia Commons (author: Larry Ewing). I resized it to a 48px square and overlayed a green triangle (start icon) and a red square (stop icon). I created then links to my batch files to my desktop and assigned the icons to the links.

Here is the result:

VirtualBox

There are several available platform virtual machines available. I generally use the Sun VirtualBox. I usually run a Linux server in my Windows-running laptop, using a virtual hard disk for it and accessing it with PuTTY and WinSCP.

VirtualBox is able to run a virtual machine also without an output terminal/window (headless). I use this for my Linux server.

Another possibility it offers is to run a machine booting from a real partition instead of a virtual hard disk. However this makes things quite difficult and is an experimental feature. The hardware found by the operating system will be different in a virtual box and booting as host, so this will lead to several problems. For example I was unable to run a deployed Vista from Linux and I could only run a deployed Ubuntu in Windows with command line interface.

Homepage: http://www.virtualbox.org/

Developer: Sun

Version: 3.0.6 (September 9, 2009)

Platform: Cross-platform

PuTTY

A terminal emulator using ssh or telnet connections to remote servers. I always use this for ssh connections from a Windows machine to a Linux machine (usually using WinSCP for file exchanges) - including my virtual linux server I run in background.

In Windows the program settings (including the saved sessions) are stored in the registry at the position: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY .

Homepage: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Developer: Simon Thatam

Version: 0.60 (April 29, 2007)

Platform: cross-platform

License: open source