Please find below some of the most popular articles I've written on Gary's Guide To Virtualbox.

In building a website scraper with Chrome and Node.js, I made mistakes that led to connection leaks. In this application, the scraper runs in a browser and connects to a node.js server, which saves data off to a database. Once you know what the issues look like, they are easy to see, but otherwise often difficult [...] Read More...

When installing Ubuntu or other 64 bit operating system on VirtualBox, you may receive the following error: "This kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detected an i686 CPU. Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU." To fix this error, recreate the virtual machine. On the “Create New Virtual Machine” [...] Read More...

After doing “npm install forever” in a VirtualBox instance you may get an error like the following. This is caused by running the install from a folder shared with the host machine. Certain file operations fail when crossing the machine/file system boundary in VirtualBox. npm ERR! error rolling back [email protected] Error: UNKNOWN, unlink '/vagrant/node_modules/forever/node_modules/winston/docs/winston/transports.html' npm [...] Read More...

This is an indication that the the base virtual image is not configured, usually from forgetting to finish the installation. This image is copied, and modified to produce the desired virtualized environment. It’s easy to fix, by running the following: vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box It is also possible that you installed the box under [...] Read More...

When running Chef for the first time on a VM, you may see an error like the following: apt-get -q -y install couchdb=0.10.0-1ubuntu2 returned 100, expected 0 The problem is that your Vagrantfile script does not require Chef to do an “apt-get update” before running it’s scripts. This normally triggers updating the apt database, and [...] Read More...

This assumes you’ve already installed Virtualbox and configured a base VM. mkdir cookbooks cd cookbooks git clone https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/apt git clone https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/erlang.git git clone https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/couchdb.git cd .. mkdir vm cd vm vagrant init vi Vagrantfile Insert the following lines before the last line “end”, like so: config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef| chef.cookbooks_path = "../cookbooks" chef.add_recipe("apt") chef.add_recipe("couchdb") end [...] Read More...

The directions as follows work for a local VM environment (VirtualBox/Vagrant), on a Windows host. Apache Bench is installed from XAMPP. If pointing ab directly at the VM, use the machine IP address (127.0.0.1 is fine). If proxying through Fiddler, it must use localhost, or the requests do not display in Fiddler. You must also [...] Read More...

Vagrant up often returns the following error running Chef scripts: The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status. Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed! mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u vagrant`,gid=`id -g vagrant` v-csc-1 /tmp/vagrant-chef-1/chef-solo-1/cookbooks You can troubleshoot this by logging into the running server, then running the command (the password [...] Read More...

Creating a 64 bit Ubuntu VM on Virtual Box results in the following error: VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration has been enabled, but is not operational. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect a 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot. Please ensure that you have enabled VT-x/AMD-V properly in the BIOS of your host [...] Read More...

Computer virtualization allows resources from one powerful server to be split among many smaller servers. This lets you manage resources more effectively, e.g. moving memory and CPU resources between virtual machines, turning machines on and off as needed, and moving machines to new hardware with minimal downtime. VMware describes vSphere as their virtualization platform – [...] Read More...