Hi all,

I am thinking of installing SUSE 10.0 and MEPIS 3.4-2 under Xen on a desktop home machine which would be connected (off and on) via dial-up. I did search past threads and didn't turn up anything, but I just thought I'd ask if anyone has heard of any grave security issues with Xen which might make me reconsider my plan.

My interest in Xen is two-fold, incidentally:
1. allegedly it can run two distros at once, so I can get the best of the debian and redhat/suse worlds (I mostly install packages the apt and rpm way)
2. improve security by running certain services on a virtual machine (probably not a huge issue on the typical desktop; however, I am considering offering some services such as Mediawiki).

Any grave security issues with Xen?
Did some digging around but couldn't come up with any "grave security issues" in Xen-current.
Not to spread FUD, but that is not to say there might not be any. As always: secure and harden,
and check the Security Considerations from the Xen User Guide with respect to treating dom0.

Thanks, unSpawn! I think I found the user guide you mean at http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ide/index.html, and this looks to be very helpful!

Thanks to http://foldoc.org/ for telling me the meaning of FUD, heh :-/

For general xen info, this might interest you:
http://www.debian-administration.org/?search=xen&go=Go
http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/xen-tools/

I haven't found reference to security problem on xen. But version 3.0 is very new (beginning of this year).
It should be integrated soon in future Linux kernel, I'm impatient for this.

Here you can find someone using xen as a honeypot (sorry for .ppt format..) :
https://www.eusecwest.com/slides06/esw06-nguyen.ppt
At the end he gives few remarks about hardening DomU and Dom0.