I’m playing with Pallet to setup an IRC server and bouncer. Pallet uses vmfest to deploy to VirtualBox.
While vmfest comes with some prepared images, I found that my laptop would not run them, so I made my own, with a lot of help from Antoni Batchelli.
- Create an image in VirtualBox with a NAT and host-only network.
- Install your favourite distro.
- Install an SSH server.
- Setup passwordless sudo
-
Make sure /etc/network/interfaces contains both eth0 and eth1.
auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp auto eth1 iface eth1 inet dhcp - Update and upgrade all packages.
- Install the guest additions
- On some Debian based distros, remove persistent-net.rules.
This should give you a working machine, but we’re not done yet. You still need to make the hard disk multi-attachable.
If you where to use this image in Pallet, you could only use it once. Multiattach means that every time a machine is made, a new copy-on-write image is created so the original stays intact.
To do this, delete the VM, but not the vdi file, and run the following command:
VBoxManage modifyhd the/disk.vdi --type multiattach
Finally, you need to create a meta file with the same name as the disk image, but with the .meta extension. As an example:
{:os-type-id "Ubuntu_64",
:sudo-password "vmfest",
:no-sudo false,
:username "vmfest",
:os-family :ubuntu,
:os-version "12.04",
:os-64-bit true,
:password "vmfest",
:description "Ubuntu 12.04 (64bit)"
:packager :apt}
