Fedora 37 and Oracle

Fedora 37 was released recently. Here comes the standard warning.

Here are the usual things I do when a new version of Fedora comes out.

Why do I do this? As mentioned in the first link, Fedora is a proving ground for future versions of RHEL, and therefore Oracle Linux. I like to see what is coming around the corner. Doing this has no “real world” value, but I’m a geek, and this is what geeks do. 

I pushed Vagrant builds to my GitHub.

If you want to try these you will need to build a Fedora 37 box. You can do that using Packer. There is an example of that here.

So now you know how to do it, please don’t! 🙂

What’s New?

So what’s new with Fedora 37? You can read about it here.

Cheers

Tim…

VirtualBox 7.0.4 and Vagrant 2.3.3 – Another VirtualBox Fail (For Me)…

VirtualBox 7.0.4

Please read the update at the bottom of this post before making any conclusions. I wanted to leave the rest of the post unedited, but needed to update my current situation as it has changed since this post was written…

VirtualBox 7.0.4 has been released.

The downloads and changelog are in the normal places.

From my previous posts on VirtualBox 7.0.x you will know I’ve been having problems with it. They all seem to come down to networking. I can often, but not always, start up an existing VM, but if I try to build a new VM with Vagrant it will fail to setup the networking. Also, if I attempt to use Packer, it will fail to find the kickstart file, which it attempts to access over HTTPS. Both cases seem to be network related.

I’ve done all the usual firewall and antivirus stuff, and trawled the internet to see if anyone else has a solution. None of that has helped.

When I saw VirtualBox 7.0.4 I was hoping this might solve my problem, but no. I get the same issues on Windows 11, Windows 10 and macOS (Intel). This makes VirtualBox 7.0.4 unusable for me.

When I revert back to VirtualBox 6.1.40, everything works as expected…

I don’t know if this is just me, or if a lot of people are having problems with VirtualBox. It seems odd that I am getting the same result on multiple machines on two fundamentally different architectures though.

So my current suggestion would be use this at your own risk…

Vagrant 2.3.3

Vagrant 2.3.3 has also been born. Upgrading to this didn’t cause or solve any issues for me. Even though I’ve had to revert back to VirtualBox 6.1.40, this new version of Vagrant is working fine for me.

Packer 1.8.4

At some point since my last run of Packer builds version 1.8.4 was released. This follows the same pattern. It works great with VirtualBox 6.1.40, but doesn’t work at all with VirtualBOx 7.0.x.

Conclusion

Sadly VirtualBox 7.0.x is still a bust for me. Maybe I’m the only one on the planet, but it is unusable for me. I hope this changes in the future as I rely on VirtualBox bigtime…

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I’ve now switched to using VirtualBox 7.0.4 completely, and all issues have been resolved. This post by Frits Hoogland explained what my problem was. This is solved by adding the “–nat-localhostreachable1” parameter. That solved my Packer problem, and subsequent VM problems. Happy days…

Update 2: An update from Simon Coter suggests the issue is due to the way Vagrant and Packer use the VirtualBox CLI, rather than the API. The workaround mentioned in the previous update is still the easiest way to move forward.

APEX 22.2 : Vagrant and Docker Updates

I know it’s hard to believe that anything happened last week other than the implosion of Twitter, but APEX 22.2 was also released.

As normal, this resulted in a bunch of updates to my builds.

Vagrant

All relevant Vagrant builds were updated to include APEX 22.2. Many had been updated recently to bring them in line with the latest Oracle security patches. You can find the build here.

https://github.com/oraclebase/vagrant

Docker/Container

As with Vagrant, all the relevant Docker/Container builds have been updated to 22.2. You can find the build here.

https://github.com/oraclebase/dockerfiles

Real World

If the release had been a couple of weeks earlier I would have been able to push it out during this quarters patching cycle. Unfortunately this release will now how to wait until the January 2023 patching cycle for me to push it out at work.

Our APEX upgrades/patches are automated (as mentioned here), so I could push this release out at the press of a button, but all the relevant teams would have to do their testing, and that probably isn’t going to happen until the next patching cycle, so it’s just going to wait until then. 🙁

My Suggestion

Even if your work environment moves forward at a slower pace than you would like, it still makes sense to keep a test/play environment at the latest and greatest versions, so you can learn the new stuff and see what issues are coming round the corner for your applications.

All my home builds are now on APEX 22.2, running on the beta release of the Oracle Games Console (#OGC). 😉

Cheers

Tim…