Machine Runner

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As a Software Engineer and a Cyber Security professional, sometimes I really need to up many machines at same time in my computer.

One pretending to be a victim, another one pretending to be the attacker, another one pretending to be something else...

It's very hard to create this bunch of machines by hand using docker or even virtual machines.

The solution

I created a simple bash script that recognizes a folder as a machine directory.

A machine directory is any directory that contains a valid machine.config file.

It could be your git repository, a random folder, your project folder, doesn't metter!

If you have this machine.config file, this directory will be considered as a machine directory.

So, to have a bunch of machines you can just create a bunch of config files and that's it, to switch over the machines you can just go inside the specific machine directory you want and run os_connect, and a shell will be opened to you with persistent state.

To see more information about the machine, just run os_info.

And you will have an output like this:

OS INFO

ID:                     d442817e2db23ed43084cd812c3ae1cddd02d7185c70ffe83d0ddf0cac281cc6
IMAGE:                  alpile:latest
STORAGE LOCATION:       /tmp/d442817e2db23ed43084cd812c3ae1cddd02d7185c70ffe83d0ddf0cac281cc6/data

Now, if you want to connect to the machine, just run: os_connect and a shell will be opened to you.

Don't be afraid to exit your machine, your data will be persisted in the Storage Location, you need to remember that this code runs over docker containers.

But, and if I want to remove the machine? Just run os_remove.

Creating the machine config file

You don't believe how easy is it.

name=alpine-os
image=alpine:latest
storage=/data

Yeah, just this three lines!

The key name is an arbitrary name to your machine, I recommend you the pattern <os-system>-os. The key image is the system image name from docker hub. The key storage is the volume path of the machine to make it persistent.

The configurations above is the necessary configurations to run an alpine system.

Installing

Just run ./install.sh

This will copy the .machinesrc to your home directory and add the following line to your .bashrc:

source $HOME/.machinesrc