I prefer using a virtualizer that offers USB support to do the install. I have used a real PC with data on it while fatigued, entered in the wrong partition, and ended up with a really bad week of restores. Virtualization allows you to only load to the USB drive and keeps your PC protected from accidents. I like to use the virtual machine with no hard drive, which makes the install simpler especially when the USB flash drive is connected before install. You can't mix up partitions or boot areas with only one drive in the virtual machine.
There are many sites about making bootable USB pen drives with Ubuntu Linux and most of these sites have the user put the ISO on the thumb drive instead of actually installing a Linux distribution onto the USB flash drive. I like to actually place the whole operating system on a USB flash drive so I always have the full operating system available. Many sites will tell you the ISO install is best but I disagree. Flash drives are much cheaper today and you can split an 8 GB drive into a Linux and a VFAT partition. I prefer using a virtualizer that offers USB support to do the install. I have used a real PC with data on it while fatigued, entered in the wrong partition, and ended up with a really bad week of restores. Virtualization allows you to only load to the USB drive and keeps your PC protected from accidents. I like to use the virtual machine with no hard drive, which makes the install simpler especially when the USB flash drive is connected before install. You can't mix up partitions or boot areas with only one drive in the virtual machine. Begin your install by selecting keyboard type and entering your host name along with other information until you reach the partition screen. The flash drive used here already had two 8 GB VFAT partitions and I erased the second one and use it for Linux. I usually select the Ubuntu alternate CD and manual partitioning but if you have only one USB drive in your VM, then you can use auto install and the whole flash drive if you won’t need the VFAT for sneaker net with other computers. It is a good time to note the path of your USB thumb drive if you have multiple drives in your system. It is /dev/sda in the virtual machine and typically /dev/sdh on my physical desktop. You might need that for the bootloader install later if you are doing this on a physical machine with multiple disk drives. Ensure the partition type is primary and bootable then select your filesystem type. I have used ext4 and ext2 succesfully. You may wish to read the benchmarks and to determine your filesystem choice then work on performance later. Note that I create the system with no swap space since the computers I would boot from typically have 2 GB of ram which tends to be enough for my needs. Also, I use a USB disk drive with 200 ms write speeds but I have found paging to slow the system down. I used to turn off browser caching and the syslog service in the past but I find newer systems perform fine with these on. Commit your changes, create the filsystem, and begin the user creation process. I like to encrypt my home directory with the built in ecrypt filesystem which leaves me feeling comfortable should I lose the USB key disk. The next step is the one that can be a nuisance should you use a physical PC. If you have only one disk, the Ubuntu installer will place the boot loader on the master boot record of the disk. If you have multiple drives, then select manual and enter the drive name on that page. On my desktop, the drive usually appears as /dev/sdh so I use that for physical installs. You must be careful not to override a bootloader on a machine you are using just for installing to a USB disk drive. You can see in the picture with the drive booted that I am using a Patriot XT flash drive on /dev/sda running Ubuntu 11.10 Oneirc Ocelot. Related articles I have completed moving the WonderBlog into a three tier architecture in a virtualized DMZ and will document the configuration in the next few weeks, but I wanted to look over virtualized home network DMZ designs I didn't choose and discuss why I didn't choose them. I wrote about the home based DMZ architecture I used, but that entry focused more on how the network was laid out. This post will discuss the designs I played with but didn't use for my home network architecture. My blog shows a three tier architecture in use, which consists of a client facing tier, an application tier, and a database tier. These three tiers are separate virtual machines, totaling four virtual machines on one server. The computer running those only has three gigabytes of RAM and I actually wanted 9 virtual machines. So I solved this problem of stuffing all of these virtual machines into three gigabytes by using operating system-level virtualization. This type of virtualization tends to be extremely efficient since it uses one virtual machine and lets the operating system partition off the virtual servers. I used OpenBSD and OpenBSD's packet filter (pf), to manage all of the Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails. I thought about some other offshoot designs. The first design was to simply do the whole thing on one virtualized server. I could have put the firewall rules into the Solaris or FreeBSD host machine and used only one VM, but I found I liked working with separate pieces that made changing one part without harming others something I couldn't resist working with. You have many choices. Simiar articles
OpenBSD ifconfig Outputlo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 33204 groups: lo inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x6 em0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 lladdr 08:00:27:57:24:6b groups: egress media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex) status: active inet 192.168.1.20 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255 inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fe57:246b%em0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 inet6 2002:43a4:a7f0:0:a00:27ff:fe57:246b prefixlen 64 autoconf pltime 16 vltime 26 em1: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 lladdr 08:00:27:fb:e9:df media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex) status: active inet 192.168.8.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.8.255 inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fefb:e9df%em1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2 em2: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 lladdr 08:00:27:68:63:2a media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex) status: activea inet 192.168.10.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.10.255 inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fe68:632a%em2 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x3 em3: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 lladdr 08:00:27:a3:ad:7c media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex) status: active inet 192.168.12.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.12.255 inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fea3:ad7c%em3 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4 enc0: flags=0<> mtu 1536 pflog0: flags=141<UP,RUNNING,PROMISC> mtu 33204 groups: pflog OpenBSD in VirtualBOX With 4 Interfaces The first interface is bridged to the Ubuntu host's ethernet adapter. The tier interfaces follow as int1, int2, int3. I have used this design with Linux's Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM), Virtualbox, and VirtualPC. The picture above shows Solaris is configured to use each interface. The Solaris Zones are assigned to each interface and they route to the OpenBSD server which performs firewall functions in packet filter. |
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