I second this approach. It has the distinct advantage of being quick to rollback. Anything based on periodic snapshots would be much quicker than a DD approach. Major downside is that the OS is running inside of a VM, meaning less performance (although it sounds like you might not care that much), but also if they tap the wrong keystroke, they jump out of the full-screen VM interface, to the main OS, which you may not want them to have to deal with.
Alternatively, if you do the DD approach, you might want to get this system set up such that the system and programs are on one partition or drive, and the data, etc., on another partition or drive, to minimize the size of the image/partition that you have to DD. As a third alternative, and if you're *really* ambitious, you could set up another computer on the same network with periodic snapshots and ISCSI target software[1], then boot this user's computer from the SAN.[2] Then, all you have to do is rollback and reboot off the network again. And the client computer doesn't even need a hard drive.[3] You probably wanted something simpler than that. Lloyd Brown [1] Linux with LVM and IET will do this. FreeNAS can do it with ZFS, I think, too, and has the added advantage of a web interface. [2] http://etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot [3] I can't really be the only person who wants to do this at my house, can I? I mean diskless, ISCSI network booting at your house! That's cool, right? Guys? On 8/17/10 8:10 AM, Richard Esplin wrote: > I setup a Windows install inside of Virtualbox. Then when it gets corrupted, > you can roll back to the last snapshot / backup. > > Richard > > -- Lloyd Brown Systems Administrator Fulton Supercomputing Lab Brigham Young University http://marylou.byu.edu -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
