A couple of questions since this thread has picked up again.
1) has anyone else noticed occasional lags in virtualbox which have remained until a vm was stopped?
I've had a couple instances where the vm just dragged to a crawl and when I logged into the Readynas the %wa (i/o waits) in top as at 90%. Stopping (actually suspending) the vm and restarting it resolved this behavior. It may be because of the software hypervisor, but I was curious if anyone else has seen this.
2) how much has anyone really pushed this?
I'm pretty timid as I only went this route to keep from messing up the main Readynas config too much and for portability of other services. I started this when I had to factory flash the firmware and had to migrate my Squeezebox config which was pretty customized. Not wanting to be shackled to the the root OS or run the risk of undermining the whole situation I moved all of the add-ons except for virtualbox to a vm and it's been awesome except for some performance issues which I hope to address with a new CPU.
That said has anyone run more than 2 vms or a bunch of multi-core vms without melting their NAS? My CPU temp idles around 90 degrees with the mid 90s if there's steady activity and up to 107-8 under heavy load (if my Yahoo widget is to be believed). I'd be curious if anyone can sustain multiple vms with reasonably low temperatures.
I've been running two, but not continuously. I start and steop them as needed so that are not always running. The interesting thing is that twice when I left one running for a couple of days it got into a bad state. When it did I tried to stop/start the services I was using and the stop command was giving me errors so, as you reported too, I just restarted the vbox and was back again. It happened twice. For what I'm doing I don't mind this behavior that much, but if I see it again I'll check IO waits. Could be a compatibility with the network drivers on the NAS or something.
great tutorial I tried it on my 4.2.23 and its working(readynas ultra2). I think you should make a new topic to keep your poston the top of the topic. Concerning the apache step, I have to add manually addtype php for apache to recognise php file .
I updated my system to 4.2.24 and there were a couple of things I learned:
1. You need to remove the links /etc/apache and /etc/apache2 to do a FW upgrade. The upgrade will fail every time with these links place. Just remove the links, do the FW update, remove the /etc/apache and /etc/apache2 directories, and restore the links. The files laid down by the fw upgrade were identical to ones you already have (if you follow Matty's instructions).
3. I used the latest Virtualbox (4.2.16) and it works fine.
4. Not sure why but the phpvboxmgr config.php user/password did not take. Logged in with admin/admin and then used the UI to add vbox as a user. Maybe there were changes in phpvboxmgr?
Kudo's to mdgm for helping me figure out the apache link problem!
I updated my system to 4.2.24 and there were a couple of things I learned:
1. You need to remove the links /etc/apache and /etc/apache2 to do a FW upgrade. The upgrade will fail every time with these links place. Just remove the links, do the FW update, remove the /etc/apache and /etc/apache2 directories, and restore the links. The files laid down by the fw upgrade were identical to ones you already have (if you follow Matty's instructions).
3. I used the latest Virtualbox (4.2.16) and it works fine.
4. Not sure why but the phpvboxmgr config.php user/password did not take. Logged in with admin/admin and then used the UI to add vbox as a user. Maybe there were changes in phpvboxmgr?
Kudo's to mdgm for helping me figure out the apache link problem!
steve
I upgraded to x.24 a few weeks ago, and had no problems upgrading the NAS (Ultra2+) firmware, and VBox is still working bang on, and exactly as it was before, (Including the error of not seeing all ISO's in my ISO folder. But this error has been present for ages I just haven't done any troubleshooting on it yet.)
That's strange. Are /etc/apache and /etc/apache2 softlinks links on your NAS? Matty's instructions said to create those. If they are there then I don't see how it worked. The tar command to extract the new image fails every time. Unless an ultra2+ has a different install image that doesn't include those directories? The Pro-6 uses the x86 image. I thought the atom based systems would use the same one, but maybe that's not the case or for some reason those files don't get laid down on the ultra2+. The files it lays down did not change with the release. I believe they were these three in /etc/apache2/mods-available: apreq.load, auth_sys_group.load, and perl.load.
That's strange. Are /etc/apache and /etc/apache2 softlinks links on your NAS? Matty's instructions said to create those. If they are there then I don't see how it worked. The tar command to extract the new image fails every time. Unless an ultra2+ has a different install image that doesn't include those directories? The Pro-6 uses the x86 image. I thought the atom based systems would use the same one, but maybe that's not the case or for some reason those files don't get laid down on the ultra2+. The files it lays down did not change with the release. I believe they were these three in /etc/apache2/mods-available: apreq.load, auth_sys_group.load, and perl.load.
steve
Well, IIRC the only tinkering I did prior to installing VBox was to load up Python2.7, PHP5.3, PHPMyAdmin, and NZBGET8.0/NZBGETWeb1.5. (Inc' WhoCares? prepped LIbsigc++2.0.0 and LibPar2.0) My etc/apt would have tweaked and run apt-get update etc.
Oh, I think his original instructions had the linking inside the php install instructions so if you already had php then maybe you didn't have the links. I'm not sure what the consequences are of not consolidating the apache locations. Maybe it's not necessary if you haven't had problems.
Honestly I went through all the steps again. Some of them were no-ops because it was already done, but after the update several commands needed to be reinstalled so I went through them all quickly. The kernel steps were definitely necessary. The images would run before that but the network was hosed in them.
Thanks Steve. I will have to review what the benefits are of the new firmware and all of those things as I have become accustomed to the whole situation 'just working' at this point so I'm not that eager to running the risk of more tinkering. My only complaint at this point is sometimes virtualbox gets an I/o bottleneck which renders my vm unusable until the vm or virtualbox Service is restarted. I'm not sure if upgrading will help this, but that would be a motivator for me. As I recently upgraded the CPU the prospect of running more than one cm has become more viable.
I get this error whenever i try to update and or install virtualbox
Server:/lib/modules/2.6.37.6.RNx86_64.2.4/misc# apt-get install virtualbox-2.1 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies: virtualbox-2.1: Depends: libfontconfig1 (>= 2.4.0) but it is not installable Depends: libice6 (>= 1:1.0.0) but it is not installable Depends: libsdl1.2debian (>= 1.2.10-1) but it is not installable Depends: libsm6 but it is not installable Depends: libxcursor1 (> 1.1.2) but it is not installable Depends: libxext6 but it is not installable Depends: libxfixes3 (>= 1:4.0.1) but it is not installable Depends: libxi6 but it is not installable Depends: libxinerama1 but it is not installable Depends: libxmu6 but it is not installable Depends: libxrandr2 but it is not installable Depends: libxrender1 but it is not installable Depends: libxt6 but it is not installable Depends: python2.4 (>= 2.3.90) but it is not installable E: Broken packages
You need to follow mattyshacks' instructions. I don't think you can get this to work just using apt-get. You need to build virtualbox yourself as he described on page 27 of this topic.
currently my Pro Pioneer is running 4.2.17 with vbox and is quiet full (90%). Will the OS reinstall work to reset everything to be ready for upgrade to .24 and compile vbox, without clearing the shares???
Been weeks so you probably already got past this, but what is quite full? The root partition or your c partition? OS reinstall should not affect your data on c, but I'm not certain on the shares. Since os reinstall is used to fix configuration problems I'm not sure what it does with the current share configuration. My Pro 6 root partition is only 33%. You might want to try to ferret out with du where the space is being consumed so it doesn't happen again.
OS reinstall resets the network configuration to use DHCP, and the admin password to the factory default value ("netgear1" on v1s, ultras and pros, "password" on v2s and OS6).
Can't run 64-bit VMs on RN516 system, the BIOS has Intel Virtualization Technology disabled. If you try to manually enable it, the system bricks itself.
I was hoping someone could help with an Installation problem, all ha gone ok, but I have got to..."Step 2: Install PHP VirtualBox Manager for ReadyNAS"
Rebooted after installing it and updating it.....and got an email after the box rebooted stating "The paths for the shares listed below could not be found. Typically, this occurs when the ReadyNAS is unable to access the data volume."
Wow, I must of defiantly done something wrong 🙂
Its factory resetting now, all that was setup was an FTP server and nasinfo
I managed to mount the /c folder and get an updated config backup for the users etc.
