System Administration

If you've ever encountered the following error when adding an existing VM to your host:

Failed to open virtual machine located in *********.vbox.
Callee RC: NS_ERROR_INVALID_ARG (0X80070057)

or from the commandline  VBoxManage registervm VirtualMachineNameSample.vbox

VBoxManage: error: Code NS_ERROR_INVALID_ARG (0x80070057) - Invalid argument value (extended info not available)
VBoxManage: error: Context: "OpenMachine(Bstr(szVMFileAbs).raw(), Bstr(strPassword).raw(), machine.asOutParam())" at line 153 of file VBoxManageMisc.cpp

One thing that you can check is see if there's a non-existing file. In my case, the solution is to edit the .vbox file manually (which is in XML format) and remove the following line:

      <DVDImages>
        <Image uuid="{a82fec76-40db-4b60-9054-4fd156c8982a}" location="/usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso"/>
      </DVDImages>

Some people say that it could also because of insufficient disk space. In my case, there was plenty of space, but this file no longer exists since it's from a different machine.

To reduce a guest machine before you perform a backup, first set the discard flag on the guest machine (while turned off), then do a TRIM inside the machine.

Run this command inside the guest machine (assuming it's running Linux): fstrim -a -v

What it does is it emulates SSD TRIM facility, which blanks out free space, since deleting a file only removes a file but doesn't mark the space as free.

If somehow you have Proxmox & CSF for blocking outside traffic vmbr0 (WAN), and have a vmbr2 LAN interface, check your ETH_DEVICE abd ETH_DEVICE_SKIP settings in /etc/csf/csf.conf and add vmbr2 in ETH_DEVICE_SKIP so it won't block internal LAN traffic.

Another day and yet another open source project got forked. Bitrig has decided to copycat OpenBSD and fork it. Do people really need yet another OS? Why not contribute back to OpenBSD? Think about the time that can be saved by open source developers if they team up and build a strong base. This is just silly. Reinventing the wheel is purely a waste of time.

I really dislike this trend in the Open Source community. There's always a new Linux/BSD distro every month and yet another derivative. There is no respect at all and this is nothing but a form of legalized plagiarism.