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 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
```
After manual repairing done, remove "v.gui = true" again and restart the VM.

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