virtualbox.org

Hey everyone,

I will start by saying I'm a complete newbie to Virtual Box. I do, however have 22 years in IT, and am familiar with HyperV (shudder) and VMWare.

What I'm trying to do - as a favor to a client - is set up an "easy to use," VM for her to do her electronic banking on. She has a MacBook Pro running 10.13.4, I installed VB 5.2.12, and downloaded and set up an oracle pre loaded Ubuntu NetApps_VM from their site.
I'd like to make the VM non persistent after I ad a couple of bookmarks into Firefox, and it would be nice to be able to prevent browsing the Internet other than those sites (but not necessary).

Any tips or help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

ChortekMark wrote:it would be nice to be able to prevent browsing the Internet other than those sites

VirtualBox does not offer any filtering software. That's the job of a filtering software, which VirtualBox isn't.

Can't you either, 1) install a "nanny" software (haven't dealt with anything on Ubuntu, or in general for that matter), or 2) teach your client to not go outside where they're supposed to go?

Fair enough.

Is there an easy way to set the VM up so that it's not persistent? Every time it's shut down, it loses any changes made in that session?

You have two options; revert to snapshot, or use an immutable image (they're the same concept really):

1. When you're satisfied with the state of your VM, you can take a "snapshot" (see ch. 1.11 Snapshots and 5.5 Differencing images). Then when you close the VM, you choose to power it off and revert to that snapshot. Do *not* get carried away with the snapshot feature.
2. An immutable image (see ch. 5.4 Special image write modes and 5.5 Differencing images) works pretty much the same way, except you don't get to be asked if you want to revert to a snapshot or not, it reverts on the next VM cold start.

The only minor issue I see with that is that if you have automatic updates enabled, your system is going to be updating and updating (on the next boot) and updating (on the next boot)... until you either take a new snapshot and merge it with the old one (for A), or, change the immutable into a normal disk, update the system, and change it to an immutable disk again (for B).

Thanks for the responses! and the info!