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Re: [LUG] Qubes

 

On 06/11/12 21:18, Simon Waters wrote:
> Security seems to be a big topic.
>
> Noted this month that Qubes is on a couple of magazines covers.
>
> It look interesting, anyone had a play?
>
> The idea seems simple enough, but I guess the question is how well it is
> executed.
>
> Only PC I have meeting minimum spec is busy being my work desktop, so
> taking time out to experiment with novel desktop distros is not going to
> win any favours with my boss.
>
>  Simon
>

I've had a brief play as I've been following everything
Rutskowska/Invisible Things Labs have been doing for years, ever since
the incredible black/blue pill virtualization rootkits debuted.

Qubes is effectively a heavily messed with Fedora spin, leveraging
automatically sandboxed Xen instances. It's actually not anywhere near
as interesting as I thought it would be and totally unusable by any
'normal' person so far. When I get more time I definitely plan to give
it a more thorough test. He/she (Rutskowska has an interesting history)
is a virtualization genuis and very worth watching closely.

Just out of interest, did you know that it's possible (with many
provisos) to nest hypervisors now? It sounds as if you're limited to a
bare metal install on your single machine because it's of course using
the VT-x instructions and we all know what happens when you nest
hypervisors... I've currently got a windows 2012 server with hyper-V 
guest fully functioning under a VMWare 9 workstation install on a linux
guest. It wasn't pretty, but it does mean I can now mostly test
virtualizing systems in my virtualized environment which is obviously a
life saver. Even I got rid of my 30+ individual computer collection a
while back, I used to have to run 1 OS per system or at best, 1 OS per
disk for testing, it was a nightmare!

Regards

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