RDP VirtualBox without the proprietary Oracle extension pack

These days, virtualisation is all the rage. The various competing virtualisation products have reached a level of maturity where they can be reliably used for server consolidation. VirtualBox is one of the easiest to use, most featureful programs available in this space and with the ability to run on many different OSes on hardware with or without VM extensions, it is also one of the most popular. However, there is one wrinkle when it comes to using it for server consolidation: the proprietary RDP/USB2 extension pack.

The conventional wisdom when running a headless server with VirtualBox is that you need to install this proprietary extension pack from Oracle. This is fine until you want to use the server in production: as the PUEL only covers you for personal use and evaluation, you must purchase licenses. You can either pay £34 per user or £670 per “socket” (which has quite a convoluted definition). This gets you USB2 and RDP support.

However, there is another way, at least when it comes to RDP support.

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SQuirreL SQL: a nice database GUI frontend for Ubuntu

Here at MalariaGEN, we use MySQL extensively, and there are myriad nice GUI tools for accessing it from our Ubuntu desktops. However, we also use Microsoft SQL Server for some of our particularly large laboratory data, and we wanted to access MS SQL Server databases on Ubuntu (11.04 Natty Narwhal) with a GUI, preferably with open source software.

Here is how to set up one such tool (SQuirrel SQL). Note that we will install the application system wide; it is also possible to install it in your home directory, and to create the custom launcher in .local/share/applications if you like. We’re focussed on the install process on Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity, but these instructions should work on other modern linux distros without too much modification.

Mounting truecrypt volume from script, without showing password in process list

I found a short article about how to mount a truecrypt volume from a shell script without showing password in process list, see also the comments which provide some alternatives and clarification.

I use…

echo $password | truecrypt -t -k "" --protect-hidden=no /path/to/encrypted.tc /media/truecrypt1

The -t option makes TrueCrypt work in text mode so you can pipe the password to a terminal prompt, and the other options (-k "" --protect-hidden=no) prevent TrueCrypt giving additional prompts which would otherwise confuse the piping of the password variable.