Tag: vagrant

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…

VirtualBox 7.0.2 and Vagrant 2.3.2

VirtualBox 7.0.2

Hot on the heels of VirtualBox 7.0, we now have VirtualBox 7.0.2. I’m not going to lie, I expected this release to happen really quickly, as VirtualBox 7.0 gave me a number of headaches.

The downloads and changelog are in the normal places.

I’m hoping this fix solves a lot of my problems.

  • Main: Fixed issue when VBoxSVC could become unresponsive if Extension Pack was not installed (bug #21167)

I’ve installed 7.0.2 on a couple of Windows machines (10 and 11), and I’m going to play with it today.

Vagrant 2.3.2

As mentioned in my post about VirtualBox 7.0, Vagrant 2.3.1 doesn’t support VirtualBox 7.0 directly, so I was expecting a quick release of Vagrant and here it is. Vagrant 2.3.2 has a single feature in its changelog.

  • provider/virtualbox: Add support for VirtualBox 7.0 [GH-12947]

I’ll be attempting some new Packer builds of my Vagrant boxes, then working through my Vagrant and Docker builds to add in the new patches. That should give it a pretty good test. I’ll update this post with the results.

If this doesn’t work out, I’ll be reverting to VirtualBox 6.1.40…

Cheers

Tim…

Updates

Update 1: The good news is VMs seem to start OK now using Vagrant 2.3.2 and VirtualBox 7.0.2. (not true, see below)

The bad news is I can’t get Packer to work, so I’m unable to build new Vagrant boxes with the 7.0.2 guest additions. I’ve tried on Windows 10, Windows 11 and macOS (Intel) and all result in the same issue. It seems the kickstart is not working, like the networking on VirtualBox 7.0.2 is screwed up somewhere.

I’ve downgraded my Windows 10 PC to use VirtualBox 6.1.40 and I’m building new Vagrant boxes on that. So far so good. I’ll upload them to Vagrant Cloud and attempt to use them with VirtualBox 7.0.2. The guest additions will be out of date, but it should still work fine, I hope. I’ll keep updating…

Update 2: After a couple of successes starting up VMs using VirtualBox 7.0.2 and Vagrant 2.3.2, it all seems to have caved in now.

I’m going to switch to VirtualBox 6.1.40 for the moment. I don’t have more time to waste on this. VirtualBox and Vagrant are tools I use to make my life easier, not an end in themselves, so I don’t have the time to keep working on this. I’m sure a future version of VirtualBox will have sorted out its networking issues and I’ll be able to use it…

Update 3: Everything is reverted to VirtualBox 6.1.40. Packer builds of OL7, OL8 and OL9 are completed and uploaded to Vagrant Cloud. I’ve started to do some Vagrant builds with them now and they seem to be working fine, so what I’m seeing is on VirtualBox 6.1.40 everything works as usual. On VirtualBox 7.0.2 I see these two issues.

  • Packer just doesn’t work. It fails getting the HTTP access to the kickstart file. I get the same issue on Windows 10, Windows 11 and macOS (Intel).
  • Starting VirtualBox VMs with Vagrant is hit-or-miss. Sometimes they work, but sometimes they fail. It also seems network related, but I can’t be 100% about that.

Update 4: 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 for this was posted by Frits Hoogland here.

Packer, Vagrant and Docker : Latest Changes

The quarterly Oracle security patches trigger a whole bunch of build changes for me. This post just gives you a run through of what happened over the weekend.

Packer

The release of VirtualBox 6.1.36 means all my Vagrant boxes on Vagrant Cloud have the wrong guest additions, so I rebuilt all of them using Packer. The Oracle Linux 7, 8 and 9 boxes are now up to date. You can see my Packer builds under my Vagrant repository on GitHub here.

https://github.com/oraclebase/vagrant/tree/master/packer

Note. During the packer builds I noticed the VirtualBox 6.1.36 guest additions require some extra packages during the installation (libX11, libXt, libXext, libXmu).

Vagrant

I had recently updated all relevant Vagrant builds with the latest versions of Tomcat, SQLcl and ORDS updates, but I was still waiting on the OpenJDK 11.0.16 release. On Friday morning I noticed Adoptium released it, so I made the necessary changes to the builds to include it. I usually don’t include Oracle patches in my database builds, but some installations, like Oracle 19c on OL8, require them. I’ve updated them to include the 19.16 patches where necessary. You can find my Vagrant builds on GitHub here.

https://github.com/oraclebase/vagrant

Docker

Similar to the Vagrant section above, the relevant Docker/Podman builds were updated to use OpenJDK 11.0.16, and the Oracle 19c on OL8 build had it’s patch script modified for the 19.16 patches. You can find my container stuff on GitHub here.

https://github.com/oraclebase/dockerfiles

Happy building!

Cheers

Tim…

ORDS and APEX 22.1 : Vagrant and Docker Builds

I was on top of the recent ORDS 22.1 release, but somehow I managed to miss the APEX 22.1 release. Here’s an update on what’s been going on with my builds…

Vagrant Builds

A number of my Vagrant database builds include APEX. Those that do have been updated to use APEX 22.1. You can find them here.

They had already been updated to use the latest versions of Java, Tomcat, ORDS and SQLcl where appropriate, so the APEX upgrade was a small change. The ORDS update was done 11 days ago. It was a bigger update, as the installation process for ORDS 22.1 has changed quite a bit. I wrote about that here.

You can read my beginner’s guide to Vagrant here.

Docker/Container Builds

I have some ORDS containers that include the APEX images, so those image builds have been updated to use ORDS 22.1 and APEX 22.1 images now.

APEX is also included in the database builds. You can find them here.

I was a little slow to add the updates to the Docker builds. The Tomcat and SQLcl changes were done a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only added the Java, ORDS and APEX changes today. I held back a little on the ORDS 22.1 changes, as I was rewriting a bunch of articles that were affected by the installation and configuration changes.

You can read my Docker/Container articles here.

Real Life

We probably won’t be putting APEX 22.1 live until the next patching cycle, which will be July. In the past I could be quite aggressive about the upgrades, but as APEX is becoming more important in the organisation, the rollout of updates has to be a bit more considered. 🙂

The same will probably be true for the ORDS 22.1 rollout. We run ORDS in containers, so it’s really quick and easy to replace all the infrastructure, but I wanted to be a bit cautious because of all the changes in the new version. Having played with it a bit now, I’m feeling a lot more confident, but at the time we were starting our patching cycle I was too nervous to include it.

As far as home systems are concerned, I only use the latest and greatest, unless there is a compelling reason not to. 😉

Cheers

Tim…

APEX 21.2 : Vagrant and Docker Builds

Unless you live under a rock, you’ll have seen APEX 21.2 was released yesterday. Being the worlds worst APEX developer, I’m not going to speak about the new release, as I’ll just embarrass myself, but I did want to give a heads-up of what I’ve been doing since the release.

Vagrant Builds

A number of my Vagrant database builds include APEX. Those that do have been updated to use APEX 21.2. You can find them here.

They had already been updated to use the latest versions of Java, Tomcat, ORDS and SQLcl where appropriate, so the APEX upgrade was a small change.

You can read my beginner’s guide to Vagrant here.

Docker/Container Builds

I have some ORDS containers that include the APEX images, so those image builds have been updated to use the APEX 21.2 images now. You can find them here.

As with the Vagrant builds, these had already been updated to use the latest versions of Java, Tomcat, ORDS and SQLcl where appropriate.

You can read my Docker/Container articles here.

Thoughts

It’s taken a long time for us to roll out APEX 21.1 at work. Most of that delay is because of competing priorities. We’ve been pushing the Oracle 19c database upgrades hard, and it’s not left much space to focus on APEX. The last of our production systems will be upgraded to APEX 21.1 next week, so I’m not sure how eager people will be when I start pushing 21.2. 🙂 I’ll try, but it might have to wait until next quarter’s security patching. We’ll see.

Despite that, APEX 21.1 is now dead to me. Long live APEX 21.2. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Database 21c Express Edition (XE) : Article and Vagrant Builds

You probably saw a stream of Tweets yesterday mentioning the release of Oracle database 21c Express Edition (XE) for Linux. It’s a very important release as it’s totally free to use.

Of course I had a play as soon as I got hold of it. If you’ve used one of the RPM installations of Oracle before, there shouldn’t be any surprises. The approach for the XE RPM installation is similar to that of the Enterprise Edition RPM installation. Here’s a quick run through.

I also added a couple of Vagrant builds for Oracle 21c XE on Oracle Linux 7 and 8.

I suspect this release has made a lot of people very happy! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Database 21c : Installation Articles, Vagrant and Docker Builds

As you have no doubt heard, Oracle database 21c was released on Friday. I went to work over the weekend doing the relevant articles and builds. They’ve been on the front page of the website since Sunday, but I was waiting for the release of the 21c preinstall package before announcing them. That has arrived now, so this is what I was up to at the weekend.

Installation Articles

First the articles for single instance, Data Guard, RAC and RPM installations.

Vagrant

There are a bunch of associated Vagrant builds on Oracle Linux 8 and 7.

Single instance database installs, using the conventional installation method, and the RPM installation.

Data Guard installs.

RAC installs.

Docker

There are two database builds for 21c database in containers.

Caution

As I wrote in my previous post, Oracle 21c is an innovation release. It’s good to play with this, but be careful when considering it for production.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’m struggling to notice the difference between “21” and “12” when reading at the moment. 🙂

VirtualBox 6.1.26, Vagrant 2.2.18 and Packer 1.7.4

Hot on the heels of VirtualBox 6.1.24 we get version 6.1.26. Let’s be honest, you knew it was coming right? 🙂

The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

When I shutdown some VMs before the VirtualBox upgrade, I noticed Vagrant 2.2.18 had been released. Downloads here.

I’ll need to rebuild my Vagrant boxes again, so I thought I should check if there was a new Packer version. Sure enough, Packer 1.7.4 was available. Downloads here. It came out just over a week ago, but I hadn’t noticed.

They are all installed now, so I’ve just got to start doing some Vagrant box builds. Happy days… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I used Packer to rebuild my OL7 and OL8 vagrant boxes. They are now uploaded to Vagrant Cloud.

Updates to Vagrant and Docker Builds : ORDS and SQLcl 21.2

The 21.2 version of ORDS and SQLcl dropped at the start of the month. I guess I missed that, as the first I noticed was Alex Nuijten talking about SQLcl 21.2 nearly two weeks later. As soon as I realised they had arrived I downloaded them and went to work.

All of the relevant Vagrant and Docker builds were updated to use ORDS 21.2, SQLcl 21.2 and Tomcat 9.0.50.

You can check out what’s new in this post by Jeff Smith.

The Oracle security patches come out next week, so these builds will be updated again to include the latest versions of OpenJDK (AdoptOpenJDK) and the Oracle database patches where necessary.

SQL Developer and Database Modeler

These aren’t anything to do with my builds, but thought is was worth mentioning. The 21.2 version of SQL Developer and Data Modeler have been available for the last few days. You can read Jeff’s announcement here.

Cheers

Tim…