RE: [Openvds-devel] Control Panel for OpenVDS-2

[Dave Cost]

> What is the status. Who's in "charge" of the openvds project?

Currently I'm the only active developer. OpenVDS-2 is still a concept more
than a real thing, but the basic pieces of it are working. It's a matter of
placing everything together.

So far, it seems possible to have a real root user in each VDS (instead of
the pseudo-root admin) and what is better, no patches will be required for
the packages installed in the VDS. Furter, apart from the kernel which is
shared between the virtuals, all other software can be completely
personalized. This will allow to run a debian image in one virtual and a
redhat clone in the other and furter, it allows to update packages in the
virtuals separately. It's possible to hard-link some files to save space at
the expense of freedom to the virtual-root user, but there won't be anything
like the skel in version 1. I'm thinking more of a collection of rpm's which
represent a functional server and which are installed on each new virtual
automatically (something very similar to a kickstart installation).

Still the administrator of the hosting server has enough control to limit
the root's of the virtuals from taking down the system of from binding the
wrong ip addresses or using too much CPU resources.

But all this is RAW power and needs to be implemented properly via control
tools and possibly with a centralized control like svsdadm can be. In fact,
apart from the authentication and encryption layers and some of the freevsd
protocol, the rest of the source from FreeVSD appear outdated and useless
and most of it will have to be rewriten. For example, there's no need for
the hosting server to manipulate the configuration files of the virtuals
directly, nor this is possible given the huge variety of packages and
software that can be installed in a virtual (this is why I think the
administrator of the virtual needs a webmin-like pannel to operate more
easily).

OpenVDS will give you VDS which will be as similar to a real servers as it
gets. This can be good or bad, depending on your point of view ;-)

Dave.