I can swear that this has been asked before but my search of the forum is turning up empty.

Is it possible to run a UML-kernel within my Linode account?

Yes, just changed CONFIG_NEST_LEVEL to 1 when compiling your UML kernel.

-Chris

Always nice to know that the Site Admin is up at 5:30AM (depending on your time zone) and provides an instant response.

I haven't begun attempting to do anything with UML yet but it is something that I am looking into and just wanted to be sure that it would work before attempting it.. Thanks for the quick response.

I'm new here, so apologies if this has been discussed before.

I plan to host a web site on my Linode, and it just occurred to me that it might be really useful to run nested UML. This is only a half-baked idea, but see what you think:

I will run two UMLs on my Linode: one for production and one for development. Only the production UML will be attached to the outside world via eth0.

To make changes to my website, I copy the contents from the production UML to the development UML, and make changes only in the development UML. After they're sufficiently tested, then I somehow make eth0 be attached to the development UML instead of production, effectively swapping them. Now the development UML is "live", and I rename it to be the production UML.

The benefit of this scheme is that it won't be possible to trash my web site by mistake while making any changes. If I totally blow it (or if apt-get upgrade does something unexpected), then I can just recopy the production UML to the development UML and try again. Only when I'm fully satisfied that it's working on the development UML do I make it live.

What do you think? Is anyone doing this?

Maturin

Hi,

Even though it is possible, in general it is not a good idea as least on linode.

Due to the limited diskspace and memory available it can make things run very slow, espically on the lower end linodes.

Adam