CAcert System Admins discussion list

[Philipp Guehring <philipp AT cacert.org>]

Hi,

>         Vservers are sufficiently secure for the purposes we have been
>         discussing and the maintainability is great (one set of mounts
>         for all systems, not one for each, for example).
>
>
>     Depends, only if all the vservers run the same kind of software,
>     which will be going to be a problem.
>
The advantage of vservers compared to most other virtualisation
technology I have seen so far is that it automatically limits the
syscalls to those that are actually needed for server services. (e.g.
services don't need to reconfigure the network)
AppArmor goes even further, and we should take a look at it to
additionally protect our services with it. (But AppArmor isn't a
virtualisation technology)

>     I would like to keep a secure network and preferably more secure
>     than it's at the moment. Secondly I really do like the idea of
>     security updates. Security updates at the moment mean that we have
>     to take down all the vservers at once on one of the boxes just
>     because we need to update a vserver 'hosting server'. If we want a
>     less interrupted[1] service we preferably move to another kind of
>     setup where we can 'move' the servers in a easy way without much
>     downtime (or none at all) while still being able to update bioses
>     (those things do contain bugs too, are risky[2]) and giving the
>     admins of the non-critical servers some form of freedom[3].
>
linux-vserver is good for moving vservers from one host to the next one,
due to the clean directory structure.
I have made sure that all our servers at BIT are prepared for
vserver-moving.

Best regards,
Philipp Gühring