Centre closure

As part of a broader organisational restructure, data networking research at Swinburne University of Technology has moved from the Centre for Advanced Internet Architecture (CAIA) to the Internet For Things (I4T) Research Lab.

Although CAIA no longer exists, this website reflects CAIA's activities and outputs between March 2002 and February 2017, and is being maintained as a service to the broader data networking research community.

Remote unix Learning Environment (RULE)

RULE from a Technical Perspective

This page describes in a little more detail how RULE is implmented>

Operating System

RULE is implemented using FreeBSD 5.x
FreeBSD's jail functionality provides the core functionality RULE builds on to provide classes or virtual hosts available through remote login via SSH.

While jail has been part of FreeBSD since the 4.0 release, RULE and the JHT that control the jailed hosts provide access to jailed hosts in a convenient and user-friendly manner.

Virtual Disks?

The JHT uses FreeBSD's ability to attach filesystem image files to memory devices, which can then be mounted as regular disk devices to give each virtual host it's own virtual disk. There are a number of advantages to using disk images instead of directories on the host filesystem. A disk image has a finite size, meaning that once the user has consumed all the space available on their disk image their virutal host will report it is out of disk space, rather than continue consuming space on the primary host's filesystem. As all files that make up a virtual disk are actually inside a single file on the primary host , creating, copying, moving and deleting virtual hosts is simplified significantly.

Still to Come ...

Last Updated: Monday 5-Jun-2006 18:34:33 AEST | Maintained by: Jason But (jbut@swin.edu.au) | Authorised by: Grenville Armitage ( garmitage@swin.edu.au)