Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - vagrant

Vagrant and Drupal, a winning team

Kris Buytaert — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 21:51:31 +0000

While heading back home from DrupalCon Munich after 4 days of good interaction with lots of Drupal folks.
I realized to my big suprise that there are a lot of people using Vagrant to make sure that developers are not working on platforms they invented their own. Lots of people have realized that "It works on my computer" is not something they want to hear from a developer and are reaching out to give them viable solutions to work on shared and reproducible solutions.

There were 2 talks proposing solutions to the problem,

the first one was ..Fearless development with Drush, Vagrant and Aegir by Christopher Gervais He talked about Drush VAgrant Integraion and how extentions to Drush allow for easy vagrant integration , bridging this gap allows rupal developers to use a tool they are already familiar with

The second one was Jochen Lillich who explained how he us using Vagrant an Chef for this purpose his talk titled Use datacenter tools to make your dev life easier has been posted already.

During the Vagrant BOF , I briefly ran over @patrickdebois old slides on Vagrant after which people started discussing their use cases.. 2 other projects came up

First is Project Oscar which aims at providing developers with a default Drupal development environment in a Jiffy. they do this by providing a bunch of puppetmanifests that sets up a working environment.

And the second one is Ariadne which is a standardized virtual machine development evironment for easily developing Drupal sites in a local sandbox that is essentially identical to a fully-configured hosted solution. It attempts to emulate a dedicated Acquia/Pantheon server as closely as possible, with added development tools. Project Ariadne is just like the examples from Jochen Lillich based on Chef

With all of these tools and examples around , there should be no excuses anymore for Drupal developers to hack on their own machine and tell the systems people "It works on my machine" (let alone to hack in production).

Our #monitoringsucks rpm is repository available

Kris Buytaert — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 19:49:39 +0000

Not only our Rubygems Builds have changed, but also my internal #monitoringsucks repository.

You might have noticed a variety of vagrant- projects on my github acount

http://github.com/KrisBuytaert/vagrant-ganglia
http://github.com/KrisBuytaert/vagrant-graphite
http://github.com/KrisBuytaert/vagrant-puppet-logstash,
Being the #monitoringsucks part of them. All of those Vagrant projects are basically my test setups to play with those new tools.

They contain a bunch of puppet modules that install and configure these tools. (Note that they mostly consist of
of git submodules to other puppet module repositories.

Given the fact that I also like to have my software cleanly installed from a package, that means that some of these tools had to be packaged, or I had to create a personal / internal repository which had packages from upstream that were hiding on the internet available.

I've forked of this repository off the internal Inuits epository so you all can also benefit from these efforts.
(You gotta love pulp :))

That means you can now install all of the above mentionned #monitoringsucks tool from our public repo on

yumrepo { 'monitoringsucks':
  baseurl    => 'http://pulp.inuits.eu/pulp/repos/monitoring',
  descr      => 'MonitoringSuck at Inuits',
  gpgcheck   => '0',
}

Patches to both the Vagrant projects and the puppet modules are welcome ...

FlossUK and Puppetcamp Edinburgh

Kris Buytaert — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:49:47 +0000

I've just finished presenting my talk on how I currently work on Puppet modules at Puppetcamp here in Edinburgh where I've been for the week talking on both FlossUK 2012 and Puppetcamp.

7 tools for your devops stack

View more presentations from Kris Buytaert

Earlier this week I opened FlossUK 2012 with my talk on 7 tools for your devops stack

How I hack on puppet modules

View more presentations from Kris Buytaert

Installing Vagrant, on Ubuntu Natty

Kris Buytaert — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:31:03 +0000

(Warning some Ubuntu ranting ahead)

apt-get install virtualbox-ose 
apt-get install rubygems
gem install vagrant

That's what I assumed it would take me to install vagrant on a spare Ubuntu (Natty) laptop.

Well it's not. after that I was greeted with some weirdness.

$vagrant
vagrant: command not found...

Yet gem list --local showed the vagrant gem installed.

$ruby
ruby:  command not found

I looked twice, checked again and indeed it seems you can install rubygems on natty with no ruby installed #dazedandconfused

So unlike other distro's on Ubuntu doesn't add the rubygems binary path to it's default path
After adding that to my .bashrc things started working better.

The active reader has noticed that by now half of the Twittersphere was pointing me to the already implemented
above solution and the other half was telling me to not install rubygems using apt-get, or to use rvm for all my rubygem troubles

Apart from the point that if you need tools to like rvm to fix things that are fundamentally broken, the fact is that joe average java developer doens't want to be bothered with RubyGem hell , he just wants to do apt-get install Vagrant and get on with his real work, and that's exactly what I'd expect from Linux for human beings

I'd expect any junior guy to be able to go to vagrantup.com read the 4 commands on the main page and be up and running
Coz that's how it works on my Bleeding Edge Enterprise Development Distro, the one I usually would not advise those people (and my mother) to use.

Using Veewee

Kris Buytaert — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:41:34 +0000

With @dancarley and @patrickebois just discussing the origin of the name of Veewee I figured I still had that piece of documentation I wrote up for myselve flying around ...

So with no other reason than having my docs mirrored on the internet .

gem install veewee

veewee templates

shows you what templates we have around ..

$veewee init natty ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64
Init a new box natty, starting from template ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64
The basebox 'natty' has been successfully created from the template ''ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64'
You can now edit the definition files stored in definitions/natty
or build the box with:
vagrant basebox build 'natty'

As noted this will generate the definition for your natty box,
It will create a definition.rb file which describes your box.
A preseed (or kickstart or similar file) and a postinstall file

The next step is then to use vagrant to build this basebox

$ vagrant  basebox build natty
 
Verifying the isofile ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64.iso is ok.
Creating vm natty : 384M - 1 CPU - Ubuntu_64
Creating new harddrive of size 10140
VBoxManage createhd --filename '/home/sdog/VirtualBox VMs/natty/natty.vdi' --size '10140' --format vdi > /dev/null
Attaching disk: /home/sdog/VirtualBox VMs/natty/natty.vdi
Mounting cdrom: /home/sdog/iso/ubuntu-11.04-server-amd64.iso
Waiting for the machine to boot
 
Typing:[1]: <Esc><Esc><Enter>
Typing:[2]: /install/vmlinuz noapic preseed/url=http://192.168.10.101:7122/preseed.cfg
Typing:[3]: debian-installer=en_US auto locale=en_US kbd-chooser/method=us
Typing:[4]: hostname=natty
Typing:[5]: fb=false debconf/frontend=noninteractive
Typing:[6]: keyboard-configuration/layout=USA keyboard-configuration/variant=USA console-setup/ask_detect=false 
Typing:[7]: initrd=/install/initrd.gz -- <Enter>
Done typing.
 
Starting a webserver on port 7122
Serving file /home/sdog/definitions/natty/preseed.cfg
 
Waiting for ssh login with user vagrant to sshd on port => 7222 to work
.....................................................................................................................................................Transferring /tmp/vbox.version20110822-6766-1xcca1e-0 to .vbox_version
..
 
 
Step [0] was successfully - saving state
 
Waiting for ssh login with user vagrant to sshd on port => 7222 to work
.Transferring /home/sdog/definitions/natty/postinstall.sh to postinstall.sh

Plenty more output here !

Be very patient .. you will see VirtualBox launch a VM and start installing it ..

The next steps are clear .. vagrant tells you what you can do next

Now you can:
- verify your box by running               : vagrant basebox validate natty
- export your vm to a .box file by running : vagrant basebox export   natty

So after validating it , you can now export the basebox and share it with other people.

The next step is to actually use that box in your own Vagrant setup, for that you need to import the box into your box collection

$ vagrant box add 'natty' 'natty.box'
[vagrant] Downloading with Vagrant::Downloaders::File...
[vagrant] Copying box to temporary location...
[vagrant] Extracting box...
[vagrant] Verifying box...
[vagrant] Cleaning up downloaded box...

To verify just run

$ vagrant box list
Centos6
MyCentOS2
debian
natty

your freslhy imported box should be in the list .

You can now use

config.vm.box = "natty"

to refer to the fresly imported box in your Vagrant file, a file that can be created by running vagrant init, or copying around another Vagrant template ..

After that .. regular vagrant fun starts, up, provision, provision, provision, destroy, and so forth ..

And then vagrant gave up ... for a while

Kris Buytaert — Mon, 02 May 2011 20:31:17 +0000

Don't you just love Ruby errors ... like the one below ?

Don't they almost make Java stack traces look readable ?
57 lines of jibberish ... where all I wanted to read was "VirtualBox in error state, check gui"

People like Randall Hanssen deserve much more visibility .. they do understand how to write a good error message and there are lots of projects that need improvement there.

Anywhow... vagrant had suddenly stopped working on me with the error below

Turned out that I had deleted some unused Virtualbox images , not from the VirtualBox gui and therefore Virtualbox didn't want to play nice ..

Upon starting the VirtualBox gui and cleaning up the images there , everything started working again ..

But the error wasn't really helpfull ..

vagrant up 
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/com/implementer/ffi.rb:95:in `call_and_check': Error in API call to get_teleporter_enabled: 2147942405 (VirtualBox::Exceptions::FFIException)
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/com/implementer/ffi.rb:69:in `call_vtbl_function'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/com/implementer/ffi.rb:36:in `read_property'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/com/abstract_interface.rb:122:in `read_property'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/com/abstract_interface.rb:64:in `teleporter_enabled'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/interface_attributes.rb:93:in `send'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/interface_attributes.rb:93:in `spec_to_proc'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/interface_attributes.rb:32:in `call'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/interface_attributes.rb:32:in `load_interface_attribute'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/interface_attributes.rb:13:in `load_interface_attributes'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/interface_attributes.rb:12:in `each'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/interface_attributes.rb:12:in `load_interface_attributes'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/vm.rb:251:in `initialize_attributes'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/vm.rb:246:in `initialize'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/vm.rb:229:in `new'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/vm.rb:229:in `populate_array_relationship'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/vm.rb:228:in `each'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/vm.rb:228:in `populate_array_relationship'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/vm.rb:218:in `populate_relationship'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/relatable.rb:242:in `populate_relationship'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model.rb:215:in `populate_relationship'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/dirty.rb:129:in `ignore_dirty'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model.rb:215:in `populate_relationship'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/global.rb:93:in `load_relationship'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/relatable.rb:192:in `read_relationship'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/abstract_model/relatable.rb:146:in `vms'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/vm.rb:185:in `all'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/virtualbox-0.8.3/lib/virtualbox/vm.rb:193:in `find'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/lib/vagrant/vm.rb:13:in `find'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/lib/vagrant/environment.rb:378:in `load_vms!'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/lib/vagrant/environment.rb:377:in `each'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/lib/vagrant/environment.rb:377:in `load_vms!'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/lib/vagrant/environment.rb:144:in `vms'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/lib/vagrant/environment.rb:180:in `multivm?'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/lib/vagrant/command/helpers.rb:19:in `target_vms'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/lib/vagrant/command/up.rb:8:in `execute'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/task.rb:22:in `send'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/task.rb:22:in `run'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/invocation.rb:118:in `invoke_task'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/invocation.rb:124:in `invoke_all'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/lib/vagrant/config.rb:115:in `map'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/core_ext/ordered_hash.rb:73:in `each'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/invocation.rb:124:in `map'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/invocation.rb:124:in `invoke_all'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/group.rb:226:in `dispatch'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/invocation.rb:109:in `send'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/invocation.rb:109:in `invoke'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/lib/vagrant/cli.rb:45:in `up'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/task.rb:22:in `send'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/task.rb:22:in `run'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/invocation.rb:118:in `invoke_task'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor.rb:263:in `dispatch'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/base.rb:389:in `start'
	from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.7.2/bin/vagrant:15
	from /usr/bin/vagrant:19:in `load'
	from /usr/bin/vagrant:19

Vagrant & Rubylibs

Kris Buytaert — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 18:11:32 +0000

I was testing some MySQL puppet modules on my Vagrant box earlier this week and one of them required augeas.
I kept running into "Could not find a default provider for augeas", however all the appropriate augeas , augeas-lib and ruby-augeas packages were installed. I inspected the different ruby directories and the files were perfectly in /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8 where I expected them.

With all the files seemd to be in the right place, my next option was to strace a small ruby script that included augeas, guess what that showed ..

stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/i686-linux/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/i686-linux/augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/i686-linux/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/i686-linux/augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/i686-linux/augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/opt/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/i686-linux/augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("./augeas.rb", 0xbfd2af1c)       = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("./augeas.so", 0xbfd2af1c)       = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

Indeed ... vagrant throws the default ruby to /opt/ruby .. and obviously there were no ruby-augeas files in there.

Converting KVM to VirtualBox

Kris Buytaert — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 22:01:57 +0000

I have had most of my test environment, aka puppetmasters, test mysql setups etc running in KVM for the past couple of years .. (yes I`m still using a lot of Xen in production environments, but we've also been using KVM for a while already .. it's a good mix) , Virtual box has always been the lesser loved Virtualization platform , however while playing more and more with Vagrant Up I realized I needed to convirt some boxen (e.g my PuppetMaster) to Virtualbox, and google was really no good help(most people seem to go the other way , or want to use some proprietary tools )

So I remembered VBoxManage and apparently I hade blogged about it myselve already ..
I just hate it when I search for stuff and google points right back to me

So I converted my puppetmaster's disks

VBoxManage convertdd Emtpy-clone.img  PuppetMasterroot.vdi
VBoxManage convertdd puppet-var.img  PuppetMastervar.vdi

Now when booting the VM in Virtualbox , obviously the kernel panicked .. as my KVM disks are recognised as as /dev/hda and and Virtualbox defaults to /dev/sda and LVM doesn't really like disks to be on another names
No commandline fu here to help me, but using the VirtualBox gui to move the disks to the IDE controller rather than the SATA controller.

Now all I need to do is wait for some smart guy who comments that you probably could use VBoxManage storagectl to achieve the same goal :)

And wait till Vagrant Up start supporting KVM , so I can move back :)