Ask Slashdot: Safe Learning Environment For VMs? 212
First time accepted submitter rarkian writes "I am the teacher in this story. I teach Python and C++ to high school students: grades 9-12. I use CentOS 6 with DRBL to run my computer lab. Some of my students have become Linux experts. Next year I'm planning on allowing students to create and run their own VMs in a segregated LAN. Any advice on which virtualization technology to use and security concerns with allowing students to be root in a VM?"
Set up VLANs (Score:4, Insightful)
for each of the students and don't allow any interface between them...and certainly no main network/internet access.
Re:VirtualBOX (Score:2, Insightful)
Incorrect.
A nice forkbomb in a single VM can cause headaches for the rest of the environment. There have also been exploits to allow one to interfere with either the host kernel or other guests, we have no reason to suspect all those bugs are crushed. VirtualBox is a fine desktop VM software, it is not however suited to this task.
Re:Set up VLANs (Score:2, Insightful)
for each of the students and don't allow any interface between them...and certainly no main network/internet access.
VLANs are not for security! Any two things plugged into the same switch, whether virtual or real, can talk to each other if sufficiently motivated.
Re:Vagrant (Score:2, Insightful)
You can check in a Vagrantfile and Chef/Puppet scripts that create a working development, test, or production environment from a base OS install and Vagrant can spin them up with a single command. It simplifies creating a new development, build, or test environment, makes everything repeatable, and gives you assurance your stuff will run again when installed on a fresh box instead of a hand-crafted VM image. The Chef/Puppet stuff is applicable to production too, so through the course of dev/test you build up a cookbook that lets you deploy anything at the push of a button. No more huge, out-of-date documents saying "install these packages, configure this, create users, blah blah blah" that you spend hours scratching your head over. No more "works on my machine" puzzles. It's really the way to go.