A Virtual Appliance can be though of as a software image containing a supporting stack designed to run inside a virtual machine. A quick look at vmware’s virtual appliance directory shows that there are hundreds of applications that can be quickly and easily deployed. In this segment I take the Dimdim open source virtual appliance, designed for vmware, and deploy it with VirtualBox (just becasue I can).
Joe Switch writes in to ask what the deal is with Virtual Routers and other such untangable networks. Matt has the answer. The way I understand it your more high end (read: expensive) Cisco and Juniper routers have virtual routers built in — much like you might have a virtual interface like eth0:1 in Linux — to manage VLANS, IP subnets and such.
In this segment Darren explains why certificate authentcation is a bajillion times better than password authentcation and demonstrates the configuration using Ubuntu 9.10 and an Interceptor running OpenWRT Kamikaze. This forum thread details setting up authorized_keys with Dropbear — the SSH daemon that comes standard on OpenWRT.
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