[tor-talk] Is there a way to use internet in a sandbox environment? (Linux)

[Mirimir]

On 04/03/2019 05:40 PM, Jim wrote:
> Mirimir wrote:
>> On 04/03/2019 08:03 AM, Ben Tasker wrote:
>>> When the system boots from the disk, it loads the OS into memory, so
>>> things
>>> like your browser cache files are written into memory (and so lost
>>> when the
>>> DIMMs lose charge).  If you want persistence then most live CDs will
>>> allow
>>> you to provide a writeable media (normally a USB drive) for that
>>> purpose,
>>> but then you get back into the risks associated with having writeable
>>> media
>>> available.
> 
> As I stated in an earlier email I am out of date on this but in the "old
> days" this was certainly not true.  In the original Knoppix (which is
> the grandfather of all live systems TMK) if you had the memory there was
> a mode where you could load the image into memory, but this was not
> necessary.  If you did load the image into memory things ran a lot
> faster.  But the only files that *had to* reside in memory were those
> that were writable.  Over the years there have been at least two
> different methods allowing writable files that reside in memory to
> dynamically and transparently be used in place of the read-only files on
> the original image.
> 
> I have certainly run live CDs on computers that had much less RAM than
> the size of the CD.

I don't recall ever trying that with "normal" LiveCDs. And even "normal"
LiveDVDs are rarely much over 1GB. But I was talking about a custom
LiveDVD that I built. Which had a Debian system plus VirtualBox and
another ~3GB of virtual machine data. I do recall trying to boot that in
a machine with 4GB RAM, with no joy. Maybe I wasn't patient enough. And
it did take some minutes to come up in the 8GB machine.

Wild guess: maybe you need to design LiveCDs so they'll boot quickly in
low-RAM systems.

>> True. And there are some limitations. As far as I know, all live
>> read-only systems allocate half of the physical RAM to the system, and
>> half to working memory. So if your machine has 4GB RM, you can load at
>> most a 2GB system image.
>>
>> But DVDs can hold ~4.7GB. So if your machine has 8GB RAM, you can load
>> 4GB from the DVD. Years ago, I built a live ISO with Debian, VirtualBox,
>> a pfSense VPN gateway VM, and stripped-down Whonix gateway and
>> workstation VMs. The workstation VM had just a simple openbox GUI. It
>> took several minutes to boot, but was very responsive afterward.
> 
>