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                        GENERAL ARTICLES
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                     The Joy of Virtual Machines
Kurt Weiske, 1:218/700

I started realitycheckBBS in 1991 and through no fault of my own have
had susprisingly good luck running the BBS on cast-off, obsolete
unwanted hardware. In 24 years of operation I can think of one failure
that caused data loss in all of that time.

To me, part of the allure of running the BBS was running a dedicated
"server" for the BBS to save me tying up my desktop system and playing
with home networking -- in the years I've run the BBS, it's had a
space under my desk, a workbench in a garage, two walk-in closets
turned server rooms and been tucked away in an entertainment center -
and acted as a file server, print server, and any other service I
could think of at home.

While my BBS package is actively maintained, most of the software I
run is trapped in the mid to late-90s. One benefit of old software is
that it's easy with modern hardware to emulate a system from that era
in a virtual machine and do away with dedicated systems.

WHAT'S A VM?

That's an expansive topic with details best covered elsewhere; at a
high level a Virtual Machine is a program that emulates a physical
environment (including hard drives, memory, CPU and peripherals) in
software.


With a VM, I can run my BBS in a windows on my modern desktop and not
worry about older hardware failing. I can share my keyboard, video and
mouse between systems. Backup is as easy as dragging and dropping
between windows. If I need to add more memory or disk space, I can do
that without a huge amount of effort.

HOW DO I DO IT?

Other sysops have painted pictures of high-availability,
high-performance virtual environments; that's not me. I'll describe
the other end of the spectrum here. I'm using a Core 2 Duo desktop
systems I bought off-lease a couple of years ago for less than $200.
It's running 64-bit Windows 7 Professional as the "host" OS. I
replaced the single smaller SATA drive with 2 large SATA drives and
set up mirroring.

Inside of Windows, I'm running VMWare Player, a free virtual machine
manager. I decided to run Windows XP as the "guest" OS to create a
nice balance between Windows and DOS app compatibility. Oracle
VirtualBox and Microsoft Virtual PC are similar packages under
Windows, and Mac and Linux host operating systems have their own
options.

Now, it's time to go into your attic and find that non-OEM CD and
license for Windows XP you haven't seen for years. OEM copies (the
kind that came on those "certificates of authenticity") are not
transferable or re-usable. For this environment, you'll want to use a
store-bought copy. Your favorite internet auction site probably has
copies available.

Download a program called XPLite (http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html)
You'll use this to take out everything from Windows you don't need to
run a BBS. The goal here is to strip out everything that you don't
need to make a small footprint in your virtual machine, and since XP
isn't fully supported without some tweaks you want to remove anything
that could be exploited.

Conversely, there are pre-made XP distributions called MicroXP and
TinyXP that are pre-configured cut-down XP environments perfect for
running a BBS. Distrubuting them is a legal gray area, but there's an
argument that running a distro and putting in a legit product key is
no different than installing it yourself. I'm not a lawyer, and you'll
have to make that determination yourself. MicroXP and TinyXP are
available via a web search and BitTorrent.

I've given my XP guest OS 100 GB of my 2 TB drive, 512 MB of my
8GB of memory, and told it to share 1 CPU. Out of that 512 MB, XP uses
120 or so. This gives me plenty of resources for desktop use while
running a VM with my BBS, mailer, utilities and a Shoutcast station.

This gives me a bare-bones 32-bit environment to run the older DOS and
Windows 32-bit programs that make up the BBS, with a modern 64-bit OS
for my day-to-day work.

Backups? I usually connect a USB drive and do a manual backup once a
week, but with some VM programs you can do a snapshot, and in a few
seconds make an image of the VM -- great for doing full system
restores after an "oops" moment.

I find it much easier to tweak the BBS in a VM window than I ever did
sitting in a cramped closet typing on an old keyboard and dim monitor.
If I'm working remotely I can remote into my desktop system and access
the BBS at the same time.

My next project is going to be to find a way to put the BBS into it's
own VLAN, so I can access it from the desktop but the BBS can't access
the desktop directly.

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