Tag Archives: VirtualBox

VirtualBox 3.2.0

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Whilst I’m waiting for my new hard disk to arrive for my Core-i5, I needed to use VirtualBox, so I decided to install it on my E5300 fileserver, which luckily has VT-x support, and of course is running a 64-Bit Ubuntu 9.10 install with 4Gb RAM.

It actually was easier than I expected, similar to the Fedora method you just add the repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list, import Oracle’s GPG key and run “sudo apt-get install virtualbox-3.2″ as described here; which even pulls in the dkms system to rebuild the kernel modules automatically.

Then I just added my username to the vboxusers group and copied over my ~/.VirtualBox/ directory from the Core-i5, editing the paths to the VDI’s to point to the backups I made.

I had to upgrade my BIOS as it seems the one I was using didn’t actually have an option to enable VT-x, although it was detected in the flags of /proc/cpuinfo

Watercooling

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I’ve just installed my Corsair H50-1 watercooler on my Core i5 750 box and its amazing – I’ve idled as low as 14c at stock speeds, I’m now overclocked to 3.2GHz (using this tutorial on Youtube) and am getting ~20c idle and haven’t got above 41c under load yet – that’s running four instances of the mprime torture test.

I also installed the new RHEL6 beta1 under VirtualBox. Its supposed to be based on Fedora 12/13, so is nothing new really, still a big step up from 5u4.

RHEL 6b1

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More Of The Same

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I’ve been testing PGP10 with GnuPG2 again, and noticed that GnuPG2 seems to embed the filename of encrypted files incorrectly – they’re always called “-&25″. Whilst they decrypt fine using GPG which I guess ignores the embedded filename and uses the actual filename, PGP cannot handle it. The fix is to add: set-filename "" to ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf

I installed my Corsair H50-1 watercooling system the other day, and on the final step found that I had a mis-manufactured part so am awaiting delivery of a replacement – which is being helped up getting between the US and Europe due to bloody Icelandic ash! So I had to put everything back together again, wasting about three hours of my time. I did at least confirm that I can get a 2-fan setup into my case, its a bit tight with the graphics card and PCI bracket though.

I installed Solaris 10u8 under VirtualBox yesterday and found that they’ve improved security by default – a lot of policies that had to be manually tightened are already set, such as SSHv2 and no root SSH. I meant to test them before applying the patch cluster, as the fixes could be due to the cluster. Update 9 should be due next month, which is the first post-Oracle release.

I’ve been playing with Nessus 4.2 exporting to Excel, using custom XSLT’s and writing more NASL’s. I installed 4.2.2 but it still doesn’t cache the SWF object.

I’m awaiting a replacement hard disk caddy for my laptop as it recently stopped working. I’m pretty sure its not the disk that’s dead as its barely been used and works fine the 10% of the time it actually does boot.

My Samsung F3 hard disk has started humming and vibrating like all the F1′s did, so I expect that is on its way out, so backing up regularly and will probably order a WD Caviar Black 1Tb next month, I’m fed up of Samsung, they’re the new Maxtor/Deskstar of the hard disk world I reckon!

Xmas 2009

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I had a lovely Christmas, spent most of the time over at M&D’s eating and drinking too much! I think they’re coming over for New Year’s Eve. We all went out for Chinese on Xmas Eve and I went over to PP’s afterwards.

I got lots of presents including a Senseo coffee machine which I have in my computer room as well as an electric toothbrush, clock radios, toiletries and booze.

I just watched Dorian Gray, which is right up there with Watchmen as the worst comicbook movie ever.

As I’d like to upgrade my PC to Fedora 12, but still need some F10-only applications (NessusClient 4.0.2 for example) I decided to clone it into a Virtual Machine.

I made a basic Fedora 10 64-Bit install under VirtualBox, then rsync’ed the filesystem using variations on the below commands (as root) making sure not to copy over /proc, /sys, /dev, /tmp and so on:

rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /sbin/ 192.168.0.133:/sbin/
rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /var/ 192.168.0.133:/var/
rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /home/ 192.168.0.133:/home/
rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /bin/ 192.168.0.133:/bin/
rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /lib/ 192.168.0.133:/lib/
....

I modified grub/fstab (screwed up a bit there and had to use a RHEL rescue CD) and ran mkinitrd to remove the encryption, LVM and Vista partition; then replaced the Nvidia drivers with VirtualBox ones, disabled Compiz/screensaver etc. It now works very well, I’ve shrunk the memory down to 1Gb and only 2 cores and the disk only uses about 17Gb. It quite amazing what you can do using rsync on a live system, who needs cloning programs like Acronis/Ghost?

Its the ultimate backup as not only can I simply re-run the rsync commands to keep it up-to-date, but I have a completely running system not just my data, and can move it to any machine I like. I could probably even migrate it back to a physical machine if I needed too.

Backup Fever

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As its a bit of a slow day today and two of my three 1Tb hard disks are dying, I’m currently backing up the stuff that’s not important enough to make it into my daily rsync regimen to a stack of 80-160Gb drives (totalling about 500Gb) I have lying around in USB and eSATA enclosures.

Just noticed that as of version 3.0.8, VirtualBox has a Fedora YUM repository, so no more downloading the RPM’s and checking the website for updates. Nothin much new in this version, although I compiled the OSE version the other day and there were a few more features, mainly GUI modifications to the floppy/hard disk/ethernet areas, but also 2D acceleration; that haven’t made it into 3.0.8