[gentoo-catalyst] catalyst + uml

[Victor Condino]

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I've been working on running network services on virtual user-mode-linux
servers for added security (I get about 1000+ ssh breakin attempts/week
and a good deal of apache exploit attempts as well, but I have
legitimate ssh users and a rather large amount of old, shaky PHP that is
still in the process of being rewritten in ruby.) At this point, i've
got a nice 463-line bash script hacked together to build my UML root
filesystems by basically doing "env ROOT=... emerge glibc baselayout ...
etc." and then tweaking a bunch of stuff in /etc to make Gentoo play
nice with UML.

The problem is that I'm still generating a "live" system... it needs to
run off a writable root fs. i'd like to get something more like the
livecd, with a read-only root (i.e. squashfs) and tmpfs links for
anything that needs to be writable, but I don't need alot of the live-cd
generation process, in particular the kernel build and bootable-ISO
generation, among other things.

Also, I was wondering how realistic it is to replace bash, grep, sed,
awk, tail, procps, psutil, etc. with busybox. I know that the
initscripts in baselayout rely on these various text- and shell-utils
and obviously on bash... is it possible to get them to run using busybox
and its builtin applets? if so that would cut down on the root-fs size
and complexity, not to mention my build time, by alot.

I know catalyst is designed to do this sort of thing, and from what I
gather, the embedded target, although meant for real (as in hw) embedded
systems, is pretty close to what I need, but when it comes to python, i
know very little, so examining the source in /usr/lib/catalyst/modules/
hasn't been too helpful. Which target is closest to what I'm looking
for, and if the embedded target is it, where can I find some good info
and an example .spec for it? I found this link:
[http://dev.gentoo.org/~mutex/catalyst-doc], but at the end there's
nothing after the line, "Links to sample spec files:" ;)

I'm willing to take the plunge and learn python if nescessary to do some
hacking on one of the existing target modules to get it to do what i
need. Basically just wondering if anyone else is interested in automated
building of this kind of system, and if anyone can suggest where to
start and what might need to be done in order to get catalyst to do
this. I don't mean to pester the developers; this is not intended as a
"feature request" or a "how do I ..." help-desk call ;)

Thanks -- V. M. Condino

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