The UML hosting action in Europe now moves south, to Italy. Here's the blurb from The Packardt Imaging which showed up this morning:
The Packardt Imaging is now selling very configurable UMLs to Italian customers who can even choose what kernel to run in their virtual server.

Look at http://thelizard.com/uml for prices and info
These guys win the prize for best UML hosting provider motto:
...take now your new flaming linuxbox...

There are more details below.

Here'w the full blurb:
The Packardt Imaging is now selling very configurable UML to Italian customers who can even choose what kernel to run in their virtual server.

Available kernels include:
LVS for load balancing
Openswan for ipsec and VPN
OpenMosix for High performance cluster
or you can build your own kernel and use it in your uml box (at your risk ;) )

Look at http://thelizard.com/uml for prices and info

We now have a UML provider in Austria. Here's the blurb:
Edis is the first Austrian provider to offer UML virtual root servers.

Full root access
Remote console access
Reinstall through web interface in seconds
Live backup and restore through web interface
Debian, Fedora and SuSE available
Multiple IP addresses
Servers are connected via redundant 155 MBit link
10 to 50 GB traffic included
http://www.edis.at/neu/vrs_server.shtml

Giacomo Lozito has put together a Slackware 9.1 filesystem and made it available. You can get it from http://www.user-mode-linux.org/~jdike/root_fs_slack9.1.bz2. A README is at http://uwww.ser-mode-linux.org/~jdike/ChangeLog.root_fs_slack9.1.

It boots with devfs, there is no root password. No special arguments to UML are needed.

The changelog provided by Giacomo is below.

This is a base installation of Slackware, with the latest base packages available on 1° March 2004. All packages installed are listed below. It was based on the root_fs_slack8.1.bz2 available on user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net, all my thanks go to whoever made it.

aaa_base-9.1.0-noarch-1
bash-2.05b-i486-3
bin-9.0.0-i486-1
bind-9.2.1-i386-1
bzip2-1.0.2-i486-5
coreutils-5.2.0-i486-2
cpio-2.5-i386-1
cxxlibs-5.1.1-i486-1
dcron-2.3.3-i386-4
devfsd-1.3.25-i386-2
devs-2.3.1-noarch-19
diffutils-2.8.1-i386-1
e2fsprogs-1.34-i486-1
elflibs-9.1.0-i486-2
elvis-2.2_0-i486-2
etc-5.1-noarch-7
fileutils-4.1-i386-2
findutils-4.1.7-i386-1
floppy-5.4-i386-3
gawk-3.1.3-i486-1
gettext-0.14.1-i486-1
glibc-2.3.2-i486-5
glibc-i18n-2.3.2-noarch-5
glibc-solibs-2.3.2-i486-5
glibc-zoneinfo-2.3.2-noarch-5
grep-2.5-i386-2
gzip-1.3.3-i386-2
hdparm-5.4-i486-1
inetd-1.79s-i486-4
infozip-5.50-i486-2
kbd-1.12-i486-1
less-382-i486-1
logrotate-3.6.8-i486-1
mailx-8.1.1-i386-2
module-init-tools-3.0-i486-1
openssh-3.8p1-i486-1
openssl-solibs-0.9.7c-i486-2
pciutils-2.1.11-i386-4
pidentd-3.0.16-i386-1
pkgtools-9.1.3-i486-1
procps-2.0.18-i486-1
reiserfsprogs-3.6.11-i486-1
sed-4.0.9-i486-1
shadow-4.0.3-i486-8
slocate-2.7-i486-2
smartmontools-5.1_18-i486-1
sysklogd-1.4.1-i486-8
syslinux-2.08-i486-1
sysvinit-2.84-i486-37
tar-1.13.25-i386-1
tcpip-0.17-i486-26
traceroute-1.4a12-i386-2
util-linux-2.12-i486-1

Jody Belka has written a HOWTO on running the Debian installer inside UML in order to get a UML-bootable Debian filesystem.

It takes you step-by-step through the process, starting with Debian installation media and finishing with a fully installed and bootable UML filesystem.

Two new projects which are working on UML administration interfaces have popped up recently. First, there was umlazi, It has been going since last July and has a accumulated a pretty good feature list.

Next up is umvs . This is newer, but appears to be as ambitious, if not more so, than umlazi, judging by the command-line options and config file.

Both appear to offer UML configuration on the command line, network configuration, and control capabilitiies, but they have unqiue features, reflecting the interests of the authors.

Russell Adams has posted a HOWTO on using conserver as a console concentrator for UMLs.

Conserver is normally used to allow multiple users access to the serial line consoles of physical machines. This use of it with UML is a straightforward, and useful, extension of that. It lets you start UMLs and allow their main consoles to be acquired by conserver. At this point, any user with the appropriate permissions may connect to them.

Prem Setu wrote a small HOWTO on running UML on RH9 (which isn't all that specific to RH9), describing how to boot Debian inside UML and set up networking to the host.

Not to be outdone, davidc wrote a UML Bridging HOWTO, which is also available in Postscript

I've made the 0.2 release of the UML management daemon, UMLd. There are numerous bug fixes along with some feature additions to provide remote access to other UMLd servers, plus some caching additions for faster UML rollout.

The UMLd page is here and there is also my UML paper covering my network which uses UMLd for administration.

A complete changelog and todo list are below.

ChangeLog
Added improved proxy support
Proxy connection caching
'on ' command for remote control
Cleaned up code & added comments
Global UML listing
Remote UML status
Remote hinfo/hcpu/hload
COW file caching for faster UML building
Added support for non-devfs UMLs
Fixed password generator character ranges
Added base for job support
Improved console logging
TODO
Background job support
'create' command queueing
Improved support for network subnets
Verify and include iptables commands
Web interface
Console interface
motd script for users
Notification support

I got the following piece of mail from Peter Hovorka today. It's good to see the hosting business starting to pick up UML.
Dear Mr. Dike,

I would like to thank you and the whole 'staff' of the User Mode Linux project for your great work!

A few weeks ago, after installation and excessive testing for a few months, our 'Virtual Dedicated Servers - VD-Server' went 'gold'.

VD-Server provides small to medium UMLs to the broad public in germany, switzerland and austria. We hope to finish work on our english website in the near future.

I would really appreciate if you'd link our attempts in using UML as a price-worthy and stable solution for virtual hosting services.

Our internet domain concerning the UML Hosting is www.vd-server.de

Best wishes,

Peter Hovorka

Anyone running UMLs with more than one CPU will notice that it leaves around a few processes after you shut it down, which among other things, stops rebooting from working properly. A patch is available which fixes this minor problem, for those too eager to wait for 2.4.19-13um.

Click 'read more' for the diff.

--- ../cvs/linux/arch/um/kernel/reboot.c Sat Jul 6 22:32:38 2002
+++ um/arch/um/kernel/reboot.c Wed Oct 9 17:20:49 2002
@@ -9,6 +9,20 @@
#include "kern.h"
#include "os.h"

+#ifdef CONFIG_SMP
+static void kill_idlers(int me)
+{
+ struct task_struct *p;
+ int i;
+
+ for(i = 0; i < sizeof(init_tasks)/sizeof(init_tasks[0]); i++){
+ p = init_tasks[i];
+ if((p != NULL) && (p->thread.extern_pid != me))
+ os_kill_process(p->thread.extern_pid);
+ }
+}
+#endif
+
static void kill_off_processes(void)
{
struct task_struct *p;
@@ -21,6 +35,9 @@
}
if(init_task.thread.extern_pid != me)
os_kill_process(init_task.thread.extern_pid);
+#ifdef CONFIG_SMP
+ kill_idlers(me);
+#endif
}

void uml_cleanup(void)

Both Bill Stearns and myself have been working on virtual hosting systems using UML. Naturally, we've both experienced a number of problems, particularly with host stability, but on the most part, UML has been stable and shown it's value for shared server hosting.

We have both produced documentation covering our own particular methods, although there is some overlap. If you're thinking of using UML for virtual hosting, it will likely be of interest to you. They're still considered work in progress, so don't be too hard on them.

Bill Stearn's UML Co-op
David Coulson's UML network