Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu sandbox for teaching

[Tom Sandholm]

Jerome,

Yes.
Using a fairly large server, (i.e. xeon dual with 4Gb ram & 120GB disk), 
and installing...
1.  Qemu
2.  vde (virtual distributed ethernet)
3.  tun/tap device drivers (usually kernel module).
I've been able to create 8 conncurrent qemu instances with reasonable 
performance.
I recompiled qemu, without sdl, as to get qemu able to run in batch, 
without the need of a console window.
I haven't been able to get qemu to run in batch using any of the 
redirected console options (like pty, or -nographic option).
I created a script that starts the vde (tun/tap), used as a tunnel from 
my home network, to the virtual network that all the qemu instances 
connect to.
Then I run a qemu startup script that starts the qemu instance, with 
assigned disk image, assigned mac address (remember you'll need 
differenct Mac's for each instance), and places it in background.
I then installed Debian "sarge" on a "master qemu instance", and also 
install bootcdwrite tools to "image" the newly installed Unix "base".  
(of course you'll also want to install ssh services).
Then I "imaged" the live system onto a cdrom image.  I can then just 
boot the cdrom image, to start-up a qemu-instance, and use the 
bootcdwrite command to write the cdrom image to virtual hard disk.  Of 
course you could just run the qemu-instance fromthe live-run-cdrom ISO, 
and just nfs mount a home directory for any form of "perm" storage (of 
course you'd NFS mount from the host-os.  You may also use the virtual 
floppy image to hold qemu-instance specifics, such as hostname, 
ipaddress, etc.  See the Debian doc's on bootcdwrite for details.
I expect that you may be able to install apache on the host machine, and 
use java-webstart to invoke some form of ssh-client, that users would 
use to ssh into their assigned qemu-instance engine.

Best of luck
Tom Sandholm


Jerome Warnier wrote:

> Does someone here have an idea on how to do the following using Qemu,
> but I'm open to other suggestions:
>
> I would like to provide a UNIX CLI sandbox for users to poke around in a
> UNIX course. It would be better if available from the web (preferably
> without having to install anything on the users' PC), and Free (as in
> free speach).
> The problem is that I need to give them root access, or at least a
> simulation.
> It would be even better if we could for instance install RedHat in it,
> but it's not really required.
>
> Thanks
>

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