virtualbox.org

i am thinking of using Virtual Box as a Sandbox, just wondering is that a good idea? like for testing stuff etc.

i am wondering tho if say my Virtual Box is compromised say with a virus or hacking, will my main (host, i think) PC be affected? will my host AntiVirus or Firewall protect the Guest VPC from such attacks?

i nv used a real sandbox b4 i am not sure what features will a real sandbox have. i think the snapshots of VirtualBox is useful in reverting to states.

The simple answer to this is YES. I do a lot of web development and I use VMs for my dev and test systems. For example I have full copies of this forum an the OpenOffice.org user forum (which I run) as LAMP VMs. If I do any testing, I keep key stuff under source control but trash the VM when I'm done.

In terms of vulnerabilities to attack, the risks are about the same as having another machine on you LAN doing this stuff. If you are worried about you VM being compromised, then don't use host file shares but do any transfers explicitly using SSH tunnelled copies or equiv.