Tuesday, 8 March 2016

A utility server in Virtualbox

When building systems in VirtualBox that have more than a few servers, or for special requirements like modelling server clusters, it is useful to have a separate virtual machine to provide the internet services one would typically find in a network. The most common services required are DNS, some kind of internet gateway or proxy server, an NTP server, and a HTTP server.

In this document I go through building a utility server to be used in a number of larger infrastructure models. Although generally I prefer to build my own installations, in this case I will use a pre-built appliance, just to provide an example of how quick and easy it can be.

Openfiler is dead. Long live openmediavault.

Just a quick update.

My efforts to update Openfiler to run on recent *EL versions of Linux died fairly quickly. The more I delved into it the more it became like trying to untie spaghetti with a spoon. However, in the meantime, I discovered openmediavault, which does the job admirably and has the benefit of being actively developed.