Roland's blog

I have Ubuntu Hardy server running on my machine. The cool thing is that I wanted to run a mail server on it too, and selected the mail option when I installed. Today, I realized that authentication is done over ssl which is really cool. I already have an email account set up and it works pretty well.

The mail server included postfix and dovecot. So cool! It even had the certificates created for me.

Let me just say that I am really impressed with today's virtualization software, in particular VirtualBox and VMWare.

My hope computer dualboots ubuntu and vista, mainly because the drivers for the Hauppauge 1600 TV Tuner work only in Vista. I compled the cx18 driver, but it's choppy and it doesn't work well with MythTV, so, moved to vista since that's what I use the desktop mainly for.

Well, I always wanted to have my CLI environment, webserver etc., but Vista is reputable for being insecure, and I didn't want to expose my desktop. So, I put a firewall on Vista and installed VMWare with bridged networking.

Then, I proceeded to install Ubuntu server edition 8.04 with a full system upgrade. Installed my tools, and configured my router to give it a static dhcp IP address, and set up the port forwarding for the stuff I need. Pretty cool so far.

Technically, if someone could get into the VM, they could proceed to mount my Vista drives and so forth. I have wondered whether I should put the VM in a different subnet, and configure the Firewall to block requests from that subnet. That's probably safer.

Anywhoo, it's pretty cool to be able to do what I am doing without having a secondary network card. Also, I have the VM use only one CPU and the other is dedicated to my activities, such as movie watching.

On a side note, Virtualbox doesn't come with bridged networking out of the box, so there might be some other clever workaround, such as the TAP virtual adapter or something like that.