.ova created from claw-playbook won't launch if it can't write to a local log file

[manez]

We discovered this the hard way as a dozen people at Islandora Camp all tried to launch a CLAW VM that wanted to write to "ubuntu-xenial-16.04-cloudimg-console.log" on the local file system that the VM was built on.

We got things working by editing this field in VirtualBox settings to point to a writable path on each user's local machine (see screenshot), but can we do away with the need to have this file written out locally at all? Or is it something I messed up when creating the VM?

[dannylamb]

I think if you set a shell variable before running vagrant up you should be able to prevent it from trying to create a log file.

$ export VBOX_LOG_DEST=nofile

We'll need to test that to confirm it, and then document it in claw-playbook's readme. I gleaned this from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VBoxLogging

But yeah... finally get the shared folder thing sorted out and this old ghost rises to replace it. 👻 👻 👻

[manez]

I think this is fixed in most environments in the .ova we shipped with 1.0.0 because it points to tmp now, but there were some issues for a few people at iCamp Switzerland (I want to say... Windows users?). @mjordan or @MarcusBarnes can you confirm? And what the fix was for those cases?

[mjordan]

Yes, the problem was that the path to that log file was /tmp/ubuntu-xenial-16.04-cloudimg-console.log and since Windows doesn't have a /tmp directory (unlike OSX and Linux), loading the VM would fail. Simply changing /tmp to c:/users/myname and saving worked in all cases I helped with.

[dannylamb]

Chances are, users who would want to use the .ova have a windows machine. Is it more appropriate to make the defaults a C:/ something or other?

[manez]

Going off impressions from the last couple of camps, windows users were in the minority. I think as long as we document the fix for different scenarios, the current configuration is probably fine for more users.

[mjordan]

I agree with @manez. Also, AFAIK Windows puts it temp directory under the user's home directory, so c:/temp won't work, each machine will have a different path to temp.

Is it possible to create an .ova that doesn't have a serial port, thereby avoiding the need for that file entirely?

[jonathangreen]

Maybe we could throw this in our vagrant file:

vb.customize [ 'modifyvm', :id, '--uartmode1', 'disconnected']

Some info including this suggestion here: hashicorp/vagrant#9425