Virtualbox r18 blah...

I've been running Oracle's VirtualBox, instead of VMware, for some time now. I liked the "free" aspect of it, along with it's availability to almost everything I run as a host OS (Solaris, Linux and yes, even Windows, on occasion).


The latest upgrade (on the windows side) is a piece of work (POS, in other words) as upgrading, was a bear.


If it fails to upgrade and you get the odd (MSI not found error) when upgrading from r16 to r18, here's a fix that may work for you (did for me):


(Stolen from https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=45536&sid=a10eb1d37e85adc7b814470463b4b314&start=15)


After trying everything and having made sure that all certificates were in order and that all drivers could be installed perfectly fine, I finally found a solution for this problem that worked for me. It had nothing to do with the driver certificates, and all to do with the driver verification done by the installer.


To install VirtualBox with that error, do the following:

1. Download the Orca MSI editor. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CFUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.technipages.com%2Fdownload-orca-msi-editor.html&ei=zxcIUIuiFePs2QWWm5DeBA&usg=AFQjCNGXxLvTAxxEIQiKhNrV3gWCn_paVg
2. Start "cmd.exe" via the Start->Run and navigate to the directory you put your setup.exe.
3. Execute "VirtualBox-4.1.16-78094-Win.exe -x"; adjust this to whatever version of Virtualbox you wish to install.
4. The installer will tell you where it has extracted the files to. Go there and move them somewhere more accessible.
5. Start Orca
6. Open the MSI file for your platform that you've just extracted & copied. In my case this is "VirtualBox-4.1.16-r78094-MultiArch_amd64.msi"
7. Enter the table "InstallExecuteSequence"
8. Drop the row "MsiProcessDrivers"
9. Save the MSI file.
10. Verify that the MSI file's modified-date has changed (for some reason Orca sometimes does not save the file)
11. Run the changed MSI.

After that, the install should work perfectly fine and ask you whether you really do want to install the drivers, even though they're not WHQL certified. Say yes to them all and enjoy using VirtualBox.


Orca MSI Editor: 
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CFUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.technipages.com%2Fdownload-orca-msi-editor.html&ei=zxcIUIuiFePs2QWWm5DeBA&usg=AFQjCNGXxLvTAxxEIQiKhNrV3gWCn_paVg


Oracle VirtualBox:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/downloads/index.html

Resistance Is Futile....

So the acquisition of Sun by Oracle is complete and today, they've changed Sun's homepage to re-direct to Oracle's. Good luck finding Sun specific products, rofl.

The customer is always last. They should have at least announced an impending change to the site. It's not like we didn't all expect one.

My Unix beginnings are all due to Sun Microsystems. I am a touch saddened by the buy-out.

The end of an era. Here's hoping for the best.

Just a quick note about mounting ZFS resource in a non-global zone...

This is in response to a question that was posted in the SUN Solaris Experts group on LinkedIn:

I keep running into people who think that you have to reboot a non-global zone to add a ZFS mountpoint. Not true.

After you add the zfs resource to your zone.xml (use zonecfg, if you follow recomendation, heh) you perform the following on the Global Zone (not within the non-global zone). Be sure to define the type as "legacy":

root@global-zone# mount -F zfs your_zpool/your_filesystem_name /zones/non_global_zonename/root/your_mountpoint

Log into your zone and you should now see the new filesystem (DF or whatever).