Vagrant and VirtualBox on Windows

gpanther — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:27:00 +0000

Vagrant is a collection of scripts written in Ruby to manage VirtualBox images in a shared environment (like the QA boxes inside a company): install them, update them, etc. Unfortunately installing it under Windows is not as straight forward as one would want, so here are some useful tips:

Read the Windows setup page and the Windows x64 setup page (if you are on 64 bit)

If you are on a 64 bit Windows install:

Check out this post if your JRuby is using the 32 bit JVM on a x64 Windows setup
You need to use version 4.0 of VirtualBox (rather than the latest). You can get it from here

You need to use an older version of Vagrant:


jgem install jruby-openssl jruby-win32ole
jgem install --version '=0.7.8' vagrant

If the vagrant box download stops around 4G, check that you have a NTFS filesystem (rather than FAT) and deactivate any "network" scanning capabilities of installed security software (I had problems with NOD32 particularly)

HTH

Creating a non-MAC bound CentOS 6 machine

gpanther — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 07:04:00 +0000

I was building VMs to be deployed with Vagrant / Virtualbox for our QAs and discovered that on new instantiations of the machine the networking interface wasn’t coming up. The problem was that Virtualbox was assigning a random MAC address to the NIC (and rightly so, to avoid conflicts). I used the following steps to solve this:

Remove the HWADDR line from /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg/eth0
Delete the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (hat tip)

These two steps are specific to CentOS 6 (on 5.x the first step is sufficient). Also, the second if is recreated at the next boot, thus after rm-ing it, you should shut down the machine and package it (not start it again, or if you do, you should remove the file again).

vagrant – Grey Panthers Savannah

Vagrant and VirtualBox on Windows

Creating a non-MAC bound CentOS 6 machine