I was hopping someone someone could give some ideas for a small problem :)
I am trying to figure out if there is a way to get older OS lige windows 95, 98, xp onto a network without running into trouble with security. My idea was a linux distro running a virtual machine, I could then have the win95 machine write data to drive and let linux share data to where i need it. Also remote access to the linux machine would let me do pseudo remote desktop on the virtual machine.
Does this make sense, or do anyone have ideas for improvements or a completely different solution?
(and no, upgrading win95 is not an option... dont ask :D )
Your basically air-gaping the windows95 like this.. which is realy the only somewhat "secure" way of running it.
If the windows95 VM has no NIC assigned and everything you use on it comes through a host share you are "fairly" save unless the file you share actually contains mallware; But you are save from attacks over the network.
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Excellent, thanks for the response, just wanted to be sure that I wasn't mistaken.
As for remote access... almost all virtualisation hosts (proxmox, xen and VirtualBox) offer a VNC console for the VMs running. So you can safely access the VM running through VNC.
If I had to run legacy like that, I would put it into a VM (proxmox or VirtualBox) assign it a hostshare, which than I would make accessible through SMB on the VHost and access the legacy VM with VNC and write data to it through the SMB share with limmited read/write access to those that know what they are doing =)
well with security the older it gets the better security it gets. since the number of people running it drop out, the less likely a virus will be after something like windows 95
A friend's company also thought that... they have a view win95 machines that run some totally custom machine control software... and they got a worm... it was out there.. noone knows how it got on there but it did O.o
I think, as long as there is still one infected system around, or one floppy with a boot-sector virus you'll at some point get it.. =/
But other than that, I totally agree.. ancient windows is as interesting as linux (was) .. and thus save(er)
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