Browsed by
Month: May 2019

Fedora 30, Virtualbox and libxcrypt

Fedora 30, Virtualbox and libxcrypt

Comments 0 Comment

It is a never ending story. New dist release, new problems with Virtualbox.

What is the current problem with a Fedora 30 guest on a Windows host and Virtualbox 6.0.8? Well, the guest additions won’t work, especially vboxadd.service refuses to start.

After asking my search engine of choice it revealed the libxcrypt to be the culprit. There are some changes mentioned at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/30/ChangeSet and it is referenced at https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=92953.

Solution:

Install the libxcrypt-compat package and the vboxadd.service will start again, problem fixed.

IBM PC Server 310

IBM PC Server 310

Comments 0 Comment

This piece of hardware is from 1996. I found it in our old server room parked under a table next to a box with cables and rack equipment.

And then I remembered the time when I sat in front of it, doing sysadmin stuff with Novell Netware 4.2. Oh my, this was a long time ago!

What do you do if you find such a long forgotten treasure? You want to see if it will boot your favorite OS from back then, right? And it booted really fast into a DOS prompt: C:\>

The ver command revealed a Windows 98 installation. After firing win, good old Windows 98 booted into the beloved GUI. I immediately felt 20 years younger 😉

As it turned out, the PC Server was in very good shape, fully functional and booting super fast. Even the CMOS battery was alive. Wow.

Awestruck as I was I shut it down (well, I just hit power-off as in the good old days) and put it back under the table. There it is waiting for someone else cleaning up and wondering if it will boot one more time …

Vagrant cheat sheet

Vagrant cheat sheet

Comments 0 Comment

A quick overview of the most useful vagrant commands.

Hint: “ve” means vagrant environment – the virtual machine(s) you run.

CommandRemark
vagrant upstart ve
vagrant haltstop ve
vagrant reloadreload Vagrantfile, restart ve
vagrant destroydestroy ve
vagrant statusshow status of ve(s)
vagrant box listshow local baseboxes
vagrant box add http://local.example.com/vagrant/box.json --box-version 2019.05.04explicitly install a box from the given location and version
vagrant box updateupdate all baseboxes currently installed
vagrant box update --box prefix/boxnameupdate just the given basebox
vagrant box pruneremove outdated baseboxes
vagrant box prune --name prefix/boxnameremove just the given outdated baseboxes
vagrant box remove prefix/boxnameremove all cached instances of the given basebox
vagrant box remove prefix/boxname --box-version 2019.05.04remove just the given basebox and version
vagrant up --provision veprovision the ve with all provisioners (again)
vagrant up --provision-with ansible veprovision the ve with ansible (again)
vagrant reload --provision vereload Vagrantfile, restart the ve and provision it again
vagrant provision veprovision the running ve without restart
vagrant provision --provision-with-ansible veprovision the running ve with ansible and without restart

How to return to a previous version of a vagrant basebox

  1. remove any vagrant environment based on the basebox you want to remove:
    vagrant destroy
  2. remove the basebox:
    vagrant box remove prefix/basebox --box-version xyz
  3. if you already pruned the previous basebox you have to download it again:
    vagrant box add http://local.example.com/vagrant/basebox.json --box-version xyz
  4. check if it is there:
    vagrant box list
  5. create a new vagrant environment:
    vagrant up