This & That

Gain access to the virtual machine via virsh console

  1. Invoke the following two commands within the guest VM:
  • systemctl enable serial-getty@ttyS0.service
  • systemctl start serial-getty@ttyS0.service

  1. On the guest VM replace the following two lines in the file /etc/default/grub

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

    by

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="console=tty0 console=ttyS0"
GRUB_TERMINAL="serial console"

  2. Then run update-grub in the guest VM.

  3. Finally, connect to the guest VM using virsh console name-of-your-vm.

Scenario VM Life Cycle Management

While a scenario page is open, the web page repeatedly sends AJAX requests to the insekta-vm server to ensure that VMs are not killed while they are in use. After closing a scenario tab, insekta-vm sets the spawned scenario VM to expired after a certain number of minutes. To remove expired VMs manually, spawn a venv shell at insekta-vm/insektavm and run $ python manage.py destroy_expired_vms to remove all expired VMs. This task can and should be automated, e.g., using a a time-based job scheduler like cron.

Network Bridge Definition

  1. Warning: this section needs further testing and documentation.

  2. Debug note: try to ping the target host from some other machine and run tcpdump -a icmp on the target host. Then keep on adjusting the routes until the ping is received.

  3. To forward network traffic to the running insekta virtual machines, append the following block to the end of file /etc/network/interfaces on the insekta host machine:

    # Bridge for VMs
auto br0
iface br0 inet static
  hwaddress ether ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff # taken from ifconfig/ip a .. the one from the actual network device
  address 420.420.420.420 # the adress that this device got .. see ifconfig
  netmask 255.255.255.224 # network mask .. ask sysadmin (i.e., 27)
  gateway 420.420.420.420 # given by sysadmin or taken from ip r
  dns-nameservers 1.1.1.1 9.9.9.9 # cloudflare DNS & Quad9 DNS service
  bridge_ports mynetwadapter # taken from ifconfig or ip a
  bridge_stp on
  bridge_fd 0