Currently, using them is a little fiddly. First, you must get a machine assigned to you by Tim or Keith (Tim or Keith: do this with `chown -R bob /data/uml/99'). This will have a two-digit name in the range 01 - 08. For example purposes, we'll use 99: make sure to replace this with the right number. Sharing virtual machines between users is a topic yet to be explored.

Using ssh, connect to katatjuta, cd to /data/uml/99, and run the start script.

    cd /data/uml/99
    sh start

This will boot the virtual machine, and throw up a couple of virtual terminals, as well as a console login prompt.

Your virtual machine is running RedHat^? 7.2 with pretty much a full installation. There's 4G of disk space, which I hope will be enough for most purposes. Do what you like: you can't break anything except the VM. If you want to create a user account for yourself, use `useradd bob'.

Networking is limited. Your VM has the address 192.168.17.99, and you can talk to other VMs. You can also talk to katatjuta itself on 192.168.18.99.

You can forward a single port on the VM to the outside world. To do this, open another (ssh!) connection to katatjuta, and run the following command.

    ssh -g -L17099:192.168.17.99:80 root@192.168.17.99

Answer `yes' when ssh asks if you want to trust the host key (this will only happen the first time), and login at the prompt.

When you have logged in, ssh connects port 17099 on katatjuta to port 80 on your VM. By default, this is bound by apache, so you can check that the port forwarding works by directing your browser to:

    http://devel.astrogrid.org:17099/

which should bring up the default apache welcome page.

To connect to a different port on your VM, just specify its number as the third part of the `-L' option. For example, if you were running cocoon on port 8080 on VM 03, you would connect it to the outside world with

    ssh -g -L17003:192.168.17.03:8080 root@192.168.17.03

When you are done, shut down the virtual machine by running, as root, the command

    shutdown -h now

and wait for the shut down messages to complete. Do double check that you are issuing this command to the virtual machine!

-- TimGoodwin - 31 Jul 2003