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Just had the time to install VirtualBox 2.2.0 on my Mac and I am looking forward to testing the new host-only mode which made it into this release. This is something I have been using for quite a while in order to setup a number of systems on isolated networks by using loopback tun-devices. The new host-only mode should make this so much easier without the hassle of setting up dhcp etc. on the host system.

Some other cool features also made it into the release such as:

• OVF (Open Virtualization Format) appliance import and export
• OpenGL 3D acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests

The complete Changelog is here http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

Posted by Patrik in Virtualization | No Comments

So, I recently got myself a MacBook. So far I have been impressed with lot's of things! And then there some stuff that I obviously have been less impressed with. One of these things has been the migration from the Linux version to the Mac OS X of VirtualBox 2.1.4. Maybe I was naive to start with, thinking that hey VirtualBox exists on Linux and it also exists on Mac, then it should be a matter of copying the files over and I should be up and running! Well, well, well it wasn't quite that simple. Looking back, I could probably have made things a lot easyer by shutting down all machines instead of moving them in their saved state.

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Posted by Patrik in Virtualization | No Comments

So VirtualBox 2.1.2 was released yesterday with some bug fixes and improvements. See the changelog for details.

One little annoying bugglet that was fixed was the clonehd function of VBoxManage. Now the cloned disks do actually work instead of ending up corrupted and unbootable as described here.

Another thing I have been having some issues with, which happens every now and then, is some unexplainable freeze when accessing files and folders on network shares in Vista. The changelog mentions a fix for this problem for Windows 2000 and I am hoping to see less of this problem now.

Another great improvement is that I can now finally run my 1023 guest machines all at the same time, this limit used to be 127

Posted by Patrik in Uncategorized | No Comments

I recieved my bubba two storage solution from Excito today! I must say that I was both surprised and impressed once I unwrapped and pluged it in to my network. It was both smaller and quiter than I expected!

I also purchased an additional 1TB eSata drive, also from Excito, which looks almost the same as the server. Knowing from their specs that the device did not yet support raid-1 I was nevertheless hoping to get this running with the additional disk I bought. So far I have synced 39.2% of the new raid array I created and things are looking very promising. For anyone intrested, these are the steps I took:

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Posted by Patrik in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Once I got all my machines converted I was extremely pleased to see that VirtualBox 2.1 now supports snapshots for vmdk disk images. This has been one of the obstacles remaining for some of my lazy co-workers to convert from VMware to Virtualbox. Before you had to convert your vmdk images to vdi in order to get support for snapshots. Now the VMware images can simply be copied to VirtualBox and off you go!

Posted by Patrik in Uncategorized | No Comments

Being all excited about Virtualbox 2.1 being released today I downloaded and installed it on my Ubuntu laptop. As quite a few changes have been made, including changes to networking, I was not very surprised to see that the configuration files needed to be upgraded by the application. However, I was surprised that 50% of them failed! I tracked the problem down to the machines I am running with custom startup and shutdown scripts for my host interfaces. It seems as the conversion failed to properly convert these machines as these scripts can no longer be used with host interfaces in the application.

According to the changelog:
"New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)"

I saw that the same issue I am having was reported here three hours ago. So if you are seeing a number of machines that fail to convert with the following message, this fix is for you.

"Assertion failed: [!name.isNull()] at '/home/vbox/vbox-2.1.0/src/VBox/Main/NetworkAdapterImpl.cpp' (1068) in nsresult NetworkAdapter::loadSettings(const settings::Key&). Please contact the product vendor!."

In order to fix the machines reporting this problem you need to:

1. Enter the directory of the Machine configuration, in my case the users name is patrik and the machine name is XP which results in the following directory /home/patrik/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP/
2. Make a copy/backup of the xml file in this directory and open it with a suitable editor
3. Look for any lines containing "<HostInterface TAPSetup" and simply delete it
4. If you have Virtualbox running simply press the refresh button of that machine and it should now convert

Obviously, you will need to setup the interface again using the configuration editor.

Posted by Patrik in Virtualization | 5 Comments

Virtualbox was released the 21st of November with a few bugfixes. Some of what was fixed was the support for Nokia USB connected phones! I thought I would try this out thoroghly before writing this post, however as I have had the luck of filling my time with other stuff :/ I realized that this will not happen. So far I can confirm that Nokia PC Suite now finds the phone and can atleast perform a full backup of my E71. However, I tried to be a little wild-and-crazy and update my firmware to the latest available which failed miserably twice. I'm guessing I should count myself lucky not bricking the phone based on the big fat WARNING messages that tell you ... whatever you do, do not disconnect your phone...

A REALLY annoying thing with the 2.0.6 release is that the number of failed resumes from a saved state have increased considerably for me. Having an increase from one or two problems with resuming a previously saved state a month to four five times since my upgrade a weak ago does not feel that great. Even though this might be totally unrelated to version 2.0.6 failures started increasing about that time.

As one of my main reasons for switching to Virtualbox was the overall speed of virtualization and the speed of resuming from a saved state, this obviously bugs me a lot. Even though VMWare was awfully slow at resuming it only failed once or twice in a year.

Posted by Patrik in Virtualization | No Comments

Installing Intrepid once again broke the USB support in Virtualbox. If your getting the following error, the next few lines are for you.

The previous fix for Hardy should no longer be used as the mountdevsubfs.sh looks different in Intrepid. The following solution was proposed in a ubuntu forum and looks as if it does the job. Simply add the following line at the end of your /etc/fstab file:


none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0


Make sure that your user is member or the group with gid 46 or adjust the above line. Once added to fstab mount the file system using:


sudo mount /proc/bus/usb


Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments

I upgraded from Hardy to Intrepid on my work laptop, a few weeks ago. Apart from ssh-keys not working through the keymanager (again) and Firefox starting up with the window title outside of the screen I'd say it all went pretty smooth. I had some problems with our backup solution, but it turned out that it had nothing to do with the upgrade.

I solved the keyring problem by deleting the .gnome2 folder in my home directory. This could most likely be solved a lot easier but I didn't have the time to dig deeper at the time. Changes have been made to the Networkmanager which now supports mobile internet connections. So far I have not successfully been able to connect to my provider using this new functionality so I'm sticking with the wvdial method.

A really annoying new thing with the network manager is that it shows all my interfaces with static ip-addresses from /etc/network/interfaces. So what? Well if you're running a lot of systems with dedicated "Host interfaces" in Virtualbox, I guess you see what I mean. As a bonus, each time I attach the network cable it tries to bring up one of those virtual interface with a static ip instead of the eth0 interface... Luckily I'm using 3g and wi-fi a lot, otherwise I would have to face facts and fix the problem

Hopefully something that can be configured better. I haven't bothered to look at any documentation, things should just work :). Perhaps an alternateive strategy by dynamically creating interfaces when starting Virtual boxes, leaving the interfaces file and ifconfig output cleaner.

Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments

Having put this project aside for a while I picked it up again after receiving a comment on a previous post. With a little help from the developer Hirte at aircrack my wifi-hacking setup is finally complete. It now works exactly the way I was hoping to get it running even when my MAC address is changed. The last parts were resolved by changing back to the r8187 driver which is available from the aircrack-ng web page here. In order to get rid of the annoying "SKB BUG: Invalid truesize (304) len=226, sizeof(sk_buff)=176" I made some adjustments to my syslog-ng configuration as suggested on their web page.

When running with a different MAC address, the address should be changed both using ifconfig and then set as parameter when starting airbase-ng with the -a switch.  Thanks again Hirte!

Posted by Patrik in Security | No Comments