Virtual Internet Appliances
October 14, 2004 – 9:17 amI had mail from Joel Spolsky yesterday in response to my postings about how difficult it is to get a working Java web development environment set up. His suggestion? Give everyone VMWare, and distribute machine images that have everything pre-configured. The more I think about this, the cooler it gets—does anyone know if anyone’s ever actually tried shipping “virtual Internet appliances” this way?
6 Responses to “Virtual Internet Appliances”
The closest thing I can thing about is “Knoppix” (http://www.knoppix.org/). It’s a complete linux system on a CD (bootable). You just need to put it into your CD-ROM and restart computer. Boom, you are in linux!! You don’t have to install anything on your HD, not even partitions (gosh, i hate linux partitions on pc). It automatically detects and supports your HW, therefore you won’t have problems like “????,i can’t get my x window running!!” You can also install software program on it too. And since it’s the only system you are running at that time, the marchine performance is just as good. I find it exciting.
I run VMware at home, but i don’t like it that much. Running VMware is just running a HUGE application on your machine. Its performance is not very satisfactory. SLOW! Don’t your hate that word? :p
Would it be possible to make an .exe file and run it on the computer, and it tunes everything for you?? That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? (Expect that .exe is kinda scary, hehe).
By Qian Zhu on Oct 14, 2004
I agree that VMWare would be unsatisfactory as a web development environment, but I don’t think Knoppix is the answer either. Although it’s quite handy, I don’t think I’d want to do any programming or web serving from a system that doesn’t preserve your settings. I also think that the automatic everything approach would not be what you want when setting up a server. You’d probably want to customize a whole lot of things (to get your various apps, cgis, and version control stuff running).
As to why it’s hard? I think this is a task done primarily by experts and infrequently (unless it’s your job to set up web dev environments for other people). So there’s no good reason for the developers of the various packages involved to bother making it easier. As soon as they do, the admins will complain that it’s making assumptions for them and getting in the way of customization.
By Adrian on Oct 14, 2004
OpenCA is an open source Certificate Authority built on top of (among other things) OpenSSL. It is notoriously hard to install; it has a relatively large number of interdependencies, and at one time it even required patching the source code of other projects.
So Dartmouth has come out with an OpenCA LiveCD, with everything pre-installed and a simple configuration wrapper to get a CA up and running.
I think this will become more common in the future, although I haven’t tripped over a MythTV LiveCD yet
By Harald on Oct 14, 2004
Silly me. I forgot the URL for the OpenCA LiveCD:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~deploypki/CA/OpenCA-LiveCD.html
And I also tripped over KnoppMyth; not really a LiveCD, but a pre-configured distribution for MythTV:
http://hust.la/KnoppMyth/
By Harald on Oct 14, 2004
Hm. I run VMware frequently, and “slow” is not a word I associate with it. At least, not if you have enough RAM to keep the VM’s RAM off the hard drive.
I’ve had software vendors send me preconfigured VM’s of their software for review. Beats the hell out of trying to set up some things myself. I don’t see any reason this scheme wouldn’t work.
By Mike Gunderloy on Oct 14, 2004
I think some of the variants on debian package build tools use a user mode linux machine to test on. Thats kinda interesting.
As well I know some web hosting services gives you a uml machine to use instead of just a login. That makes running application servers and stuff possible. They bundle the server etc with it already configured in the uml machine. I think that is a variant of what you are talking about.
By Jon on Oct 15, 2004