Vagrant Tips and Tricks

Contents

How to start a Vagrant VM with GUI

Sometime it may be necessary to start a VM with a GUI, e.g. to analyze a strange booting problem. However our servers have no GUI installed.

Login to our Host Server

Login to our host server as vagrant with X server redirection. It is recommended, that you copy your ssh key first to vagrant's authorized keys file. The example shows the situation with the MGT system on LU2.
```
$ ssh -X vagrant@lu2.softxs.ch
$ cd vms/mgt
$ vi Vagrantfile    # add "v.gui = true" in section "config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |v|"
$ vagrant reload
```

How to Repair Root Filesystem

If we see in the console (s. GUI above) the following error message, than it is not possible to start the VM:
```
An error occurred while mounting /.
keys: Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery.
```
In that case stop the VM by "vagrant halt", find the appropriate VMDK file, e.g. /home/vagrant/VirtualBox VMs/geopy/box-disk1.vmdk and attach it to an existing VM with a similar command to the following (assumed that "geopy" is to be repaired and vmt3 is used to attach to):
```
$ VBoxManage storageattach eb0db1e2-688d-4477-b585-f8108a8b1cd6 --storagectl 'SATA Controller' --port 3 --device 0 --type hdd --medium ~/VirtualBox\ VMs/geopy/box-disk1.vmd
```
The id of the VM can be found under /home/vagrant/vms/vmt3/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/id. The name of the storage controller and free port number can be fid out with "VBoxManage showvminfo eb0db1e2-688d-4477-b585-f8108a8b1cd6".

After the storage attached to the existing VM, start it up and perform e.g. "fsck /dev/sdb1". If it is ready, shutdown the VM, detach the VMDK file and start the repaired VM:

$ cd vms/vmt3
$ vagrant halt
$ VBoxManage storageattach eb0db1e2-688d-4477-b585-f8108a8b1cd6 --storagectl 'SATA Controller' --port 3 --device 0 --type hdd --medium none
$ cd ../geopy
$ vagrant up