Any time you give a shell account on a unix system to anyone it is only a matter of time before they screw it up. If your goal is to have a very low maintenance easily restored environment you can hardly beat a virtual machine. All your OS and apps fit in 4-5 gig, it can be saved to DVD or CD where it is safe from anything but breakage, loss, or theft.
Pretend for a moment you are a single mom with 2.5 jobs and 2.5 kids. You have little time and less patience with computer problems and your good for nothing boyfriend just sits around the flat watching porn on the cable. This would be a great tool to have, a real time saver, and very easy on the pocket book.
All true - but it is something you do once then you save it to DVD and you're done.
And when the kiddies screw up their account, mom has to catch the late bus to job #2 so she can reconstruct the account because "stupid" is too busy watching football highlights.
I think any application that opens tcp/ip sockets needs a note from God before installing, but otherwise you have good points.
Last edited: Feb 12, 2007