Virtual Appliance 5 Trial

This trial is obsolete!

Please see the version 6 trial instead!

Background

The FreeNATS virtual appliance has traditionally been based on the rPath LAMP appliance.

For a number of reasons (problems with the management interface b0rking PHP, lack of knowledge about administration and update issues) a decision was made to look at finding a suitable replacement VM environment for the FreeNATS appliance.

A wide number of systems were trialled including some LAMP appliances, DSL, Puppy and vanilla installs. A LFS was even briefly considered. None of these quite met the requirements of being functional, manageable and having a small enough footprint to consider for FreeNATS.

However we now believe a winner has been found in the form of TurnKey LAMP.

Why TurnKey

The TurnKey LAMP appliance we are currently trialling (2009) uses an installation of Ubuntu 8 LTS. This is a version of the most widely used Linux installation with guarenteed long-term support.

The advantages for using TurnKey LAMP/Ubuntu are many but mainly it provides a stable (and automatically updated) commonly used platform which should be easy to administer and manage for future use while still retaining a reasonable package size.

The Trial

Following testing at FreeNATS HQ the FreeNATS VM 5 Release Candidate is being made available for general use and testing.

Please note that there is a version of TurnKey LAMP in the pipeline using Ubuntu 10 LTS. It is envisioned that the 10 LTS base will be the actual Virtual Appliance eventually supplied to end-users in general release. However as this is still only in the development phase and not available as a VM the LAMP 2009 (Ubuntu 8 LTS) is being used for this trial.

How to Participate

Please download the FreeNATS VM 5 RC 1 Virtual Appliance for VMWare and go about using it. You can login as root (password freenats) and then will be prompted to change your password as well as seeing some information on how to access administration functions on the appliance.

Updates will be performed automatically by the system and you can also use the apt utility to install anything else you need.

Base shell commands (e.g. for automatic upgrading etc) are the same as rPath.

Feedback

If you do try the VM 5 please provide any feedback through the standard channels e.g. the forum or feedback form. All input is gratefuly received as always.

Warning

This is a 'trial of a new enviromment'. You should not move any mission-critial monitoring onto it. Please consider the possibility of copying some configuration (via the backup and restore features to duplicate settings on the new system and run alongside.

The current recommended VM is still 4b based upon rPath for users who require a stable environment.

Download

The VM can be downloaded at: http://www.purplepixie.org/freenats/downloads/vm-freenats-5a-rc1.zip (363 Mb Zip file)

What Do I Get For My Extra 100Mb

All security updates to November 2010 are installed along with a base install of FreeNATS 1.10.0a.