Vagrant Fails To Start VM with Bad Default Machine Folder

I’m here at PuppetConf in Portland and one of the speakers got me all excited again about Vagrant. I’ve played around with Vagrant before, but he was showing off some awesome features that I didn’t realize existed which made me want to play with the tool again (more on that later!). Anyway, I updated all the versions of things Vagrant-related and tried to use it again. However, when I downloaded one of the default images from the getting started page I was greeted with an awesomely descriptive error:

[default] Importing base box 'lucid32'...
The VM import failed! Try running `VBoxManage import` on the box file
manually for more verbose error output.

Running it with VBoxManage as instructed gave a slightly-better-yet-not-so-useful error:
VBoxManage: error: Appliance file must have .ovf extension
VBoxManage: error: Details: code VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80bb0004), component Appliance, interface IAppliance, callee nsISupports
Context: "Read(Bstr(pszAbsFilePath).raw(), progressRead.asOutParam())" at line 302 of file VBoxManageAppliance.cpp

A few Google searches for this error got me almost nowhere except that it was likely a VirtualBox configuration issue. Great. After digging around for far too long, I figured out that it was because when I had played with Vagrant/VirtualBox in the past I had configured VirtualBox’s default machine folder to an external drive that I didn’t have plugged in! Doh. Anyway, was a pretty easy fix but I thought I’d share if it saved someone some time. The default machine folder is set on the first screen in the VirtualBox preferences window (at least for me on my Mac).

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Sep 23rd, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

Indexing the Cloud

I think from now on I’ll give all my machines names based on buzzwords. It makes for some awesome error / status messages. Today’s message from Spotlight after upgrading to OS X Lion definitely didn’t let me down. I had to share.

The cloud is a big place..

 

As an aside.. be sure to give plenty of time after the upgrade is finished for Spotlight to index things again. While my laptop isn’t unusable, it slows things down quite a bit.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Sep 17th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

Enabling Tab Complete for Python Shell on OS X

I have been struggling with an issue for a bit while trying to get tab completion working on the python shell on OS X. I’ve been working on a Django project and not being able to tab complete has been a bit obnoxious. It took a few sessions of searching around to find out what’s going on, so I thought I’d share it in one place. Turns out that the default shell settings are ready to go with tab complete (I spent a lot of time making sure configs were correct), but OS X simply doesn’t ship GNU readline. Instead, Apple just symlinked BSD libedit which is problematic because the default python readline module links to GNU readline.

Someone has already created an egg with readline statically linked just for OS X so the fix is super-easy. Just install the standalone readline module with your favorite python installer. I used:
sudo easy_install readline

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : May 30th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

SugarCRM Chef Cookbook Published

After delaying cleanup on the code for a week or two, I’ve published my cookbook for deploying SugarCRM CE using Opscode Chef. The cookbook utilizes the community cookbooks from Opscode for deploying the standard LAMP stack on a machine, grabs a copy of the latest stable build of SugarCRM CE from Github, and creates a silent installer file for super-easy installation of SugarCRM.

Some quick notes on setup:

Usage

Usage is super easy, especially with a general knowledge of Chef. I’m not going to dive into setting up Chef, they’ve got some great documentation for that.

You’ll need to pull down the php, apache2, mysql, openssl, and git community cookbooks from Opscode and upload to your organization as well.

Then, you can just download the sugarcrm cookbook and upload to your organization:
knife cookbook site vendor sugarcrm
knife cookbook upload sugarcrm

Then, add the sugarcrm recipe to whatever node or role you desire. For me, I created a role for sugarcrm:
$ knife role show sugarcrmchef_type: role
default_attributes:
description:
env_run_lists:
json_class: Chef::Role
name: sugarcrm
override_attributes:
run_list: recipe[sugarcrm]

You can either bootstrap a new VM / cloud instance or apply the role to an existing machine and do a run of chef-client.

For my example, I created a new EC2 instance based on Ubuntu (can be any OS that the Opscode community cookbooks support):
knife ec2 server create -r 'role[sugarcrm]' --image ami-7000f019 -d ubuntu10.04-apt -S mykey -x ubuntu -i ~/.ssh/mykey.pem

Then, you can navigate to your server’s FQDN/sugarcrm in your browser to complete the install. Not to worry, the cookbook configures a config_si.php (si = silent installer), so no need to know any details about your install.

Once complete, you’ll reach the login page. Default login is admin/admin (which can be overridden with override attributes in the role/node).

That’s it!

Filed under How-Tos / Tips, News : Comments (0) : Apr 30th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

No Software Repositories in SuSE Enterprise on EC2

For anyone who knows SuSE Enterprise, you can file this one under “what a n00b!” (my SuSE experience in the past has been with openSUSE), but I recently inherited a project that required RHEL or SuSE Enterprise so they chose to deploy SuSE Enterprise on EC2 to reduce acquisition time. (Who would’ve thought a cloud provider like Amazon would be faster to acquire an install of one of these softwares that used more traditional licensing models?) Anyway, I needed to install a few extra pieces of software, but when I ran yast, its list of repositories was empty!? Turns out the fix is really easy, but I couldn’t easily find the answer within a minute or two, so I thought I’d share:

suse_register -a email="myemail@whatan00b.com"

Yup, that was it. No license key required (at least on the EC2 build). Novell just wanted my email address.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Mar 25th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

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