Open Solaris in VirtualBox - Comparision and Usefulness

Posted on September 14, 2008 by nseidm1.
Categories: 32 bit, 64 bit, LAMP, OS, Solaris, Sun, UNIX, linux, open, seamless, virtualbox.

Open Solaris is only available in a 32bit flavor, and is well supported by Sun’s VirtualBox. When your host OS is 64bit you cannot use flash in your web browser without using nspluginwrapper, or installing a 32bit compatibility layer. Rather than having a tremendous amount of unnecessary code on your system, simply to run flash in a web browser, I prefer using a 32bit OS in a VirtualBox guest environment. Open Solaris supports seamless mode and from a graphical perspective is indistinguishable from a standard Debian based Gnome desktop.

On the backend Open Solaris is very different. Utilizing a UNIX kernel, and a custom Sun package management system there are a variety of nuances that make Open Solaris different. Aptitude, and the shorthand apt-get command is only available in Debian land, and yum is only available in Red Hat land. Open Solaris utilizes pkgadd. The following is a tabled list comparing the two package management systems:

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/apt_ips/

After getting the hang of Open Solaris a bit, it becomes functional just like Linux. Its stable like Linux, with the main advantage that it is supported by Sun Corporation.

It is probably extremely debatable whether to use a UNIX based OS or Linux. From a LAMP server environment I see little difference in functionality.

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Instant iPhone VPN

Posted on March 2, 2008 by nseidm1.
Categories: JanusVM, iPhone, open, privoxy, source, squid, tor, virtualbox, vpn.

I highly recommend JanusVM for your iPhone VPN solution. Janus incorporates squid, tor, and privoxy providing much more than just a VPN. Squid is a proxy server, which will speed up your connection slightly. Tor is a network of servers around the world that will scramble your network traffic so its practically impossible to track who or where you are. And privoxy will strip all sensitive data from your website browsing to further improve your wireless security. Obviously the VPN part of Janus will allow your iPhone to have a secure connection to the internet, so you can access wifi anywhere without fear of anything!!!

The best part is JanusVM is that it’s completely free. I highly recommend donating a little money if you have it. The author of the software is providing a great service to the open source community, and now allows iPhone users to have a secure, reliable, and instant VPN solution!

http://janusvm.peertech.org/

Just pop JanusVM into a VirtualBox machine, and setup host networking to grab an external ip address. Configure your iphone to access your external ip address, the associated pptp port (port 1723), and viola your VPN should be up and running in about 15 minutes worth of configuration :)

In the future I will post a graphical tutorial on this, but for now try searching this blog, in the upper right hand corner, for more information about setting up virtual machines and configuring host networking.

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