I love virtual machines. My home office used to have 6 servers (3 Intel, 3 SPARC), 2 laptops, and 2 workstations. On top of that I was about to add 5 more Intel servers when I decided I had to do something! I decided that the number of servers could not increase dramatically, so I set up a virtualization server where I run all the small Intel based servers and an Intel physical server. I reserve the physical one for the must-run services (like web server, source control, bug tracking, etc.) and the virtual one for those servers that come and go depending on the development project we are working on. If SPARC based machines where not so expensive I would have created a virtual environment already with them. Maybe I will do in the near future.

There are some issues I will be handling on this environment, including:

• Anti-Virus
• Server Management
• Remote Control

With so many Windows based servers, how do you prevent viruses from roaming across your local network? I have a home based office. I buy Microsoft Live OneCare Anti Virus for my physical machines. But then I noticed my virtual machines didn’t had the a reassuring icon on the taskbar tray showing the system had been secured. It was time to find an anti-virus.

First I thought about purchasing more licenses of Microsoft Live OneCare. It has been good so far. Haven’t had any outbreak on my network. It even detected some viruses that CA eTrust had missd before I un-installed it.

But then I thought: at the rate I am creating virtual servers I will go bankrupt. More than that, these servers are only used once in a while. Most of the time they are off. So I just want to put some basic protection in them so that my virtualization server doesn’t become a petri dish for all kinds of nasties.

Searching in Google for Open Source Anti-Virus I found Clam Win. Installed it on my virtual machine, and started a scan - finished fairly quickly. I do not know if it was ultra-efficient or just not very thorough. One of the inconveniences about anti-virus is that it is like insurance: you do not find out if it was good until disaster happens. Opinions from trusted sources also help.  One thing I didn’t liked was that it doesn’t scan on the fly, as you download things from the web, for example.  Not a big problem when most of the interaction of these development virtual servers are with other machines within my own network.  Certainly not something I want to use on my roaming laptop.

Have you used Open Source Anti-Virus products?

It is fairly easy. Most Linux distributions auto mount usb drives. However, if you are like me, you may have a Linux system that has just the barebones for the purpose you have in mind. For example, I have a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server as a photo webserver. When I plug in my drive, it doesn’t pop up on a desktop: there is no Windows-like desktop!

Fortunately it only takes me few commands to get in business:

1. If your drive is NTFS formatted (like mine is), you may need to update your system:

sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

2. Find the drive device ID:

fdisk -l /dev/sd*

3. Mount the drive.

sudo mkdir /media/usbsudo mount -w -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/usb

(where /dev/sdc1 is the device found with the previous command, and ntfs-3g is for NT File System, but you may use something different like vfat or ext3).

That is it! It is mounted and ready to use.