patrik.cqure.net

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 Virtualization | 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:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by patrik in Howto | 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!

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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