Mike's Blog
Vagrant Debian Box
Today I couldn't get synced (shared) folders working first time around with Vagrant and VirtualBox, which led me to creating my first Vagrant "box" AKA base system virtual machine image based upon a VirtualBox instance.
After spending ages on a wild goose chase because I thought the issue was due to a mis-match in the VirtualBox guest additions version compared to the version of the VirtualBox client, I eventually reaslised that all I needed to do was reinstall the package 'virtualbox-guest-utils' in order to run mount with "vboxsf" as a recognised filesystem.
Another brilliant tip came from the "Vagrant: Up and Running" book by Mitchell Hashimoto (as opposed to Google) for reducing the finished packaged box file size, ready for redistribution. Runnning the following command effectively defragments the virtual disk image, ready for optimised compression. Handy!
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/EMPTY bs=1M $ rm -f /EMPTY
Update: 19/05/2014. I was getting some issues with "stdin: is not a tty" errors while provisioning using the shelll, which was leading to other problems when attempting to solve it by using "config.ssh.pty = true". I finally found the real solution from http://tech.karbassi.com/2011/11/09/stdin-is-not-a-tty/ which needed applying to the default /root/.profile file.