Tag: virtualLabs

Whilst my virtualisation ramblings may seem to be taking a scattergun approach, I’m actually trying to explore the space in a way that generalises meaningfully in the context of the open and distance education.

The motivating ideas essentially boil down to these two questions / constraints:

• can we package a software application once that we can then run it cross-platform, anywhere, both locally and remotely?
• can we package the same software application so that it is available via a universal client? I tend to favour the browser as a universal client, but until I can figure out how to do audio from remote desktops via a browser, I also appreciate there may be a need for something like an RDP client too.

I’m also motivated by “open” on the one hand – can we share the means of production, as well as the result — and factory working: will the approach used to deliver one application scale to other applications in different subject areas, or the same application, over time, as it goes through various versions.

My main focus has been on environments for running our TM351 applications (Jupyter notebooks, various databases, OpenRefine) as well as keeping legacy applications running (RobotLab, Genie, Daisyworld) as well as exploring other virtualised desktops (eg for the VREP simulator) but there is also quite a lot of discussion internally around used virtualised environments to support our cybersecurity courses.

I suspect this is both a mature and an evolving space:

• mature, in that folk have been using virtual machines to support this sort of course for some time; for example, this Offline Capture The Flag-Style Virtual Machine for Cybersecurity Education from University of Birmingham that dates back to 2015, or this SEED Labs — Hands-on Labs for Security Education from Syracuse University that looks like it dates back to 2002. There is also the well-known Kali Linux distribution that is widely used for digital forensics, penetration testing, ethical hacking training, and so on. (The OU also has a long standing Masters level course that has been using a VM for years…)
• emerging, in that the technology for packaging (eg Docker) and running (eg the growth in cloud services) is evolving quickly, as are the increasing opportunities for creating things like structured notebook scripts around cybersecurity activities).

Recently, I also came across Labtainers, a set of virtual machines produced by the US Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Cybersecurity and Cyber Operations billed as “fully packaged Linux-based computer science lab exercises with an initial emphasis on cybersecurity. Labtainers include more than 40 cyber lab exercises and tools to build your own.”

Individual activities are packaged in individual Docker containers, and a complete distribution is available bundled into a VirtualBox virtual machine (there’s also a Labtainer design guide). There’s also a paper here: Individualizing Cybersecurity Lab Exercises with Labtainers, Michael F. Thompson & Cynthia E. Irvine, IEEE Security & Privacy, Vol 16(2), March/April 2018, pp. 91-95, DOI: 10.1109/MSP.2018.1870862.

I actually spotted Labtainers from a demo by Olivier Berger / @olberger that was in part demonstrating a noVNC bridge container he’s been working on. I first posted about an X11 / XPRA bridge container I’d come across here; that post describes the JAremko/docker-x11-bridge container which I can run to provide an noVNC desktop through my browser; we can then run application separate application containers and mount the bridge container as a device, exposing the container application on the noVNC desktop. Olivier’s patched noVNC desktop container (fcwu/docker-ubuntu-vnc-desktop offers access to “an Ubuntu LXDE and LXQT desktop environment” so that it can be used in a similar way.

You can see it in action with the labtainers here:

A supporting blog post can be found here: Labtainers in a Web desktop through noVNC X11 proxy, full docker containers; there’s also an associated repo.

From the looks of it, Olivier has been on a similar journey to myself. Another post, this time from last year, describes a Demo of displaying labtainers labs in a Web browser through Guacamole (repo). Guacamole is an Apache project that provides a browser based remote desktop that can act as a noVNC or RDP client (I think…?!).

One thing I’m wondering now is can this sort of thing be packaged using the “new”, (to my recollection, third(?) time of launching?!), Docker Application CNAB packaging format?

(For all their attempts to appeal to a wider audience, I think Docker keep missing a trick by not putting the Kitematic crew back together…)