Details for the talk on Sunday are as follows:
************************************************** User Mode Linux as a hosting platform Paul Warren & Chris Lightfoot, Mythic Beasts Date: Sunday 5th December Time: 6.30pm Venue: Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road (entrance up concrete steps and turn left) Afterwards: In the Lamb and Flag, St Giles' **************************************************
As the name suggests, User Mode Linux (UML) is a user-mode implementation of the Linux kernel. The result is a light-weight mechanism for creating virtual Linux machines. One of the more obvious and successful applications of UML is hosting virtual Linux servers, allowing users to take control of their own Linux installation without the expense of buying and maintaining their own server hardware.
This talk gives details on the workings of UML and also describes the integration that we have done to implement a UML hosting service. Along the way, we will cover a diverse range of topics including:
* Network bridging * Logical Volume Management (LVM) snapshots, for backups * Filesystem image manipulation * Sparse files * Bandwidth monitoring using MRTG
We will also cover a number of tools that we have written, and (in most cases) released as open source projects, including:
* blocksync, a utility for performing fast network backups of filesystem images * consolidate, a logging console manager * our server management scripts
... and explain how all this open source goodness fits together to make a viable hosting service.