Running Microsoft Windows in VirtualBox?

Dear all,

this is my first post after setting up an OOD instance on our Slurm-based HPC. I’m really impressed and have to say that this is one of the best pieces of software for HPC, in particular in vision, that I have seen in a long time. By the way, I made OOD work with mod_authnz_pam on CentOS 7.7; if this is interesting to anyone then I could share this in another post (if this is the right forum for this).

Anyway, here is my question:

  • Has anyone successfully run Microsoft Windows (e.g., in VirtualBox) through Open OnDemand?

I know, I could always run a Singularity image that contains VirtualBox and somehow wire together the relevant parts and make sure that the virtual box kernel drivers are loaded on the hosts.

I’m just wondering whether anyone has gone through all these gymnastics and would be willing to share their results.

Best wishes,
Manuel

Hi and welcome! First, yes any docs about authentication are good, and I’d noted the mod_authnz_pam note somewhere. Though you should be warned that basic authentication is not very secure, so if you can hook into an IDP I’d highly recommend it.

To your actual question about Windows. No, I’m not aware of anyone doing this. But maybe wine may be better than VirtualBox? I’ve spent a lot of time running Linux desktops (MATE, XFCE and KDE) desktops in Singularity containers, but adding VirtualBox (or similar VM virtualization) in the mix may not work out of the box yet because we rely on the X11 server of the host machine. So wine being a native application and using the hosts’ X11 server may work better.

Hope that helps!

Hi, could you explain why Auth Basic is not secure?

Thanks for your other notes.

Sure! I’ll tell you what someone told me when I was confused about LDAP (apparently even ldap authentication in apache is basic).