Hosting a blog on Minix
Chris Double
possibility of writing Minix drivers in languages other than C. To keep
track of my notes on Minix I started a weblog. To make it interesting I
wanted to host it on Minix using 'httpd' which is included with Minix
3.
As I don't have a reliable net connection to host it on an actual box
I'm trying running it under qemu on a user mode linux machine where I
host my other websites. Surprisingly this actually works reasonablly
ok.
I run qemu 'headless' - that is I compiled it without any graphics
support. I installed Minix on my local machine using qemu, preparing
the disk image and installing the software I wanted. Then I sent the
image to the user mode linux machine, fired up qemu headless, exposed
SSH so I could get to it and did some iptables to redirect ports, etc.
It's running here:
There are some issues. Occasionally the qemu session segfaults under
load. It doesn't happen on my local machine so I suspect either a
problem running qemu under the kernel I'm using on the host or
something to do with the user mode linux is killing it. I'm
investigating it.
To work around the segfaults I run qemu in a script that restarts it if
it dies. I set the fsck in Minix to automatically repair any problems.
Any tips on running a Minix httpd server? Any security issues I should
know about in locking down the Minix box? An advantage of running it in
qemu is if it does get hacked I can just delete the disk image and
start again I guess.
[1]
http://groups.google.com/group/fa.haskell/browse_frm/thread/43f22847305b00ba
Chris.
--
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz
ast
on the main page.
Other links to MINIX 3 sites are welcome.
Andy Tanenbaum
Chris Double
> I added a link to this site on the "Other MINIX 3 Websites" page listed
> on the main page.
Thanks for that.
For the curious, I was unable to work around the issues with qemu
segfaulting. It appears to be related to running it under user mode
linux so I moved it to my own machine running Ubuntu. It no longer
segfaulted, but every now and then the qemu process would hang. I think
this is also related to the httpd hanging I mentioned in another post.
So I've now gone to using 'VMware Server'. This product by VMware is in
beta and is currently free. It allows running different operating
systems and connecting to them remotely. Effectively it gives me a
similar setup to what I was doing with qemu but Minix seems to be
running a lot more solidly now. No crashes or hangs yet.
Chris.
--
http://www.minixtips.com