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

KVM Virtualization in Ubuntu 10.10

I was going to write a quick howto on Virtualization within Ubuntu 10.10 and KVM, then ran across this:
http://www.howtoforge.com/virtualization-with-kvm-on-ubuntu-10.10

No point in replicating effort, so have a gander. It's pretty concise.

Veritas VEA 4.x on OSX

Update: 07.28.08
Note: This is only for version 4.x of VEA. 5.x is not currently working, with this method.
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w00t!

I finally got around to working on this again. Sorry for those who've been asking for it.

turns out, it's quite simple, lol!

Here's how you can get the VEA GUI working in OSX:

Generally, I hate Java, but this does rock.

- Copy /opt/VRTSob from a UNIX host, put it in /opt on your Mac and replace /opt/VRTSob/jre/bin/java with a symbolic link to /usr/bin/java on your Mac.

- Run: /opt/VRTSob/bin/vea.

That's all there is to it.