Strange Virtualbox Error

Yesterday, I upgraded to the latest version of Virtualbox - its my favourite virtualisation product for the laptop/desktop market. I like to stay up to date.

Suddenly the shared folders weren't!

The virtual network was still working, so that wasn't the problem.

A quick 

lsmod | grep vboxsf

produced no result. But entering

modprobe vboxvfs

returned the error message:

FATAL: Module vboxvfs not found.

Aha! Something I could use. I reckoned that something had happened to the virtualbox addins. Which doesn't completely make sense. I could see that they might have become out of date, but not that they "disappear". Lets try re-adding those additions.

I selected Install Guest Additions from the devices menu and a cdrom image appeared the VM desktop. A quick

mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Ignore the messages about read-only filesystems and then 

cd /media/VBOXADDITIONS_3.1.2_56127

and enter

/bin/sh VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run 

Answer the questions as appropriate. And Bob's your uncle.

# mount -t vboxsf Downloads /mnt

# mount 

...

Downloads on /mnt type vboxsf (rw)

#

Its all there. And that's that!

VirtualBox Shared Folders

Shared Folders on VirtualBox would be fantastic if it wasn't such a PITA to access them the first time on XP.

Setting one up is easy, but accessing it is something else. At first I thought they weren't working on XP. Indeed others have come to the same conclusion!

Some quick googling brought me to the following blog. Huzzah! A solution. 

Now, carefully click on the expand icon () right next to My Network Places. Make sure you click exactly on the expand icon. If you accidentally clicked on My Network Places, you ruined everything and you will have to go back and start all over again.

I'm not sure what the difference was thought to be by Microsoft design team. From a user perspective I'm struggling to think of anything else I would want explorer to do for me at this point. Perhaps one of the team has blogged about it, but... Well, now I know.

Given the age of the blog the documentation ought to be considerably clearer than it is.

So it goes!

First thoughts on Accurev

I've just installed Accurev.

On a Linux box as the server and a client. And on a XP box as just a client.

Admittedly, the "boxes" were actually virtual machines running on Sun's xVM VirtualBox software - my favourite free PC Virtualization software. At the moment, anyway. Starting up an XP image on a PC running XP is much faster than booting the XP machine!

Anyhow, back to Accurev.

It is was a very smooth installation. As you'd expect from a commercial application. The installation begins by listing what will happen, and ends by showing you the same list with the success status of each item. A very favourable installation compared to the installation of Subversion a couple of months earlier. Installing Subversion wasn't bad experience, mind! Just not as polished as Accurev.

I took screenshots all the way through the install process with the aim of throwing them up on the web, but frankly I do not think it is necessary. Unless you are an irredeemable newbie, it is just so straightforward. Just "Click Next to continue". Well... Almost. There was a small amount of text to type in.

Perhaps the only benefit from showing you a screen shot would have been to demonstrate that the two installations were essentially the same. A benefit of Java technology!

The one thing I had to remember was to copy the keys.txt licence file I was sent by Accurev to the /opt/aacurev/storage/site_slice/ directory to overwrite the empty keys.txt file already there. Once done, I was licensed.

I've only been using the client for a couple of days now. Again it is looks and feels the same across the two platforms. Again the benefit of using Java. Having used ClearCase and Attache on *nix and Windows for 13-ish years now, I'd have to say that any ClearCase user would feel at home.

Adding files and directories is straightforward. Promoting those files to the parent stream was also quite straightforward. I might not have that terminology quite correct just yet. However, by comparison to Perforce it seems much more userfriendly. That also might not be fair on Perforce. We haven't paid maintenance on Perforce since , well probably since 2002!

That's that for now. I'll keep posting on my progress.