Subj : FidoNews 40:14 [01/08]: General Articles
To   : All
From : FidoNews Robot
Date : Mon Apr 03 2023 00:14:58

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                        GENERAL ARTICLES
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Run your BBS in a virtual homelab
Kurt Weiske - 1:218/700


Are you still running your BBS on a dusty old PC in the corner?

With a second-hand PC (or that PC you have laying around after a
desktop upgrade) you could set up a virtual homelab, letting you play
with new operating systems, new applications, and give that BBS a new
home.

What's a virtual homelab? By using a PC and a hypervisor, you could
run several virtual systems on one physical server, including your
BBS.

Hypervisors are operating systems that let you run other systems,
virtually, on top of the hypervisor. VMWare ESXi, qemu, xcp-ng and
others are hypervisors in common use running homelabs. Since the
underlying OS isn't meant to do much except run virtual machines,
bare-metal hypervisors don't use many resources, freeing resources for
the virtual machines running inside of it.

Want to block ads on all of your devices at home? Play with home
automation? serve your videos and music to smart TVs? Back up your
desktop? Make a quick backup of the BBS before a major upgrade? You
can do all of this and more with a virtual homelab.

I set up a homelab to test out new applications outside of work, got
familiar with the tech, saw the advantages and thought, why not run
the BBS as a guest VM and get rid of the BBS box?

I'm using Proxmox, a bare-metal hypervisor based on Debian Linux, kvm
and qemu. It runs on most any hardware that runs Debian, unlike
VMWare's pickier products. It's free and community supported, but with
a paid support option.

I'm using the same hardware that used to run just the BBS, but with
Proxmox I have multiple virtual machines running on the same system,
plus the ability to do "snapshot" backups, real-time backups of the
file system while the system is running. Those are very handy when
doing an upgrade that could break your system.

(full disclosure: you'll need to plan for enough RAM and disk to host
the virtual servers, which could mean needing more of both. I'm
running 16GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk, which is more than enough for
a small lab.)

If you want to dabble in virtual machines without making the move to a
full bare-metal lab, you could try out Oracle Virtualbox, Qemu or
VMWare Player on your desktop PC and run a couple of virtual instances
there.

With a homelab you can create a DOS-appropriate environment for that
old DOS BBS, emulate common network and video hardware that had wide
support with older OSes, run 32-bit OSes on modern hardware, or run
multiple systems all with the same physical footprint.

Long gone is the homelab I had in the 2000s, with one hardware
firewall, a BBS box, web/mail server, and test Windows box - each a
physical server taking up a good part of my garage - and each using
electricity.





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