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   Run your BBS in a virtual homelab   
   Kurt Weiske - 1:218/700   
      
      
   Are you still running your BBS on a dusty old PC in the corner?   
      
   With a second-hand PC (or that PC you have laying around after a   
   desktop upgrade) you could set up a virtual homelab, letting you play   
   with new operating systems, new applications, and give that BBS a new   
   home.   
      
   What's a virtual homelab? By using a PC and a hypervisor, you could   
   run several virtual systems on one physical server, including your   
   BBS.   
      
   Hypervisors are operating systems that let you run other systems,   
   virtually, on top of the hypervisor. VMWare ESXi, qemu, xcp-ng and   
   others are hypervisors in common use running homelabs. Since the   
   underlying OS isn't meant to do much except run virtual machines,   
   bare-metal hypervisors don't use many resources, freeing resources for   
   the virtual machines running inside of it.   
      
   Want to block ads on all of your devices at home? Play with home   
   automation? serve your videos and music to smart TVs? Back up your   
   desktop? Make a quick backup of the BBS before a major upgrade? You   
   can do all of this and more with a virtual homelab.   
      
   I set up a homelab to test out new applications outside of work, got   
   familiar with the tech, saw the advantages and thought, why not run   
   the BBS as a guest VM and get rid of the BBS box?   
      
   I'm using Proxmox, a bare-metal hypervisor based on Debian Linux, kvm   
   and qemu. It runs on most any hardware that runs Debian, unlike   
   VMWare's pickier products. It's free and community supported, but with   
   a paid support option.   
      
   I'm using the same hardware that used to run just the BBS, but with   
   Proxmox I have multiple virtual machines running on the same system,   
   plus the ability to do "snapshot" backups, real-time backups of the   
   file system while the system is running. Those are very handy when   
   doing an upgrade that could break your system.   
      
   (full disclosure: you'll need to plan for enough RAM and disk to host   
   the virtual servers, which could mean needing more of both. I'm   
   running 16GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk, which is more than enough for   
   a small lab.)   
      
   If you want to dabble in virtual machines without making the move to a   
   full bare-metal lab, you could try out Oracle Virtualbox, Qemu or   
   VMWare Player on your desktop PC and run a couple of virtual instances   
   there.   
      
   With a homelab you can create a DOS-appropriate environment for that   
   old DOS BBS, emulate common network and video hardware that had wide   
   support with older OSes, run 32-bit OSes on modern hardware, or run   
   multiple systems all with the same physical footprint.   
      
   Long gone is the homelab I had in the 2000s, with one hardware   
   firewall, a BBS box, web/mail server, and test Windows box - each a   
   physical server taking up a good part of my garage - and each using   
   electricity.   
      
      
      
      
      
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