Vagrant Errors and What To Do About Them

Some common Vagrant fixes:

• A message pops up about configuring grub-pc. This means the boot loader is unsure which disk to use. Use the tab key to move the cursor to Ok, hit the Enter key, press the space bar to select /dev/sda (or if that's not available, you can just select all devices), then tab to the Ok button again and hit Enter.

• You get the message "garbage at the end of line 0: .../private_key": Check your path to your Vagrantfile and make sure none of the folder names have spaces or other special characters (such as quote marks). Rename any folders; for example, maybe change "se3800's files/my solutions" to se3800/my_solutions. You will probably need to follow this by

          vagrant halt
          vagrant up
          vagrant ssh
  

  to get access to /vagrant (since Vagrant images seem to capture the path name on startup).

• Vagrant starts, but when you type cd /vagrant you get an error about the vagrant folder not existing. Actually, the error may start further back: the system gives timeout messages about connecting to the network adaptor. Try turning off Hyper-V:
  1. Open the Windows Settings (start menu, click on the gear icon).
  2. Enter "turn windows features" in the search box and click on Turn Windows features on or off.
  3. In the Windows Features window, clear the Hyper-V entry.
  4. Expand Hyper-V and make sure both entries under it are also cleared.
  5. Click OK and reboot the computer as required.

• The /vagrant directory is empty; that is, when you type ls /vagrant there are no files listed. Type exit to exit Linux and type vagrant reload.

• You get a message stating that an error occured and you need to look at the virtual box manager.
  1. Open Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager
  2. Find the virtual box related to your Ubuntu instance. It should be named something like [folder]_default_XXXXXX_XXXX where the folder is the place from which you ran the vagrant up command and the the Xs are numbers. Presumably the instance is not running.
  3. Select the VM instance and click the Start button.
  A message should pop up saying why the VM will not start. Help related to this message may be below.

• When you try to start the VM, you get a message like "This host supports Intel VT-x, but Intel VT-x is disabled." Some MSOE laptops are distributed with the virtual machine support disabled. There are two possible fixes:
  • The preferred solution is to configure the VM to not require the support. Open VirtualBox, power off the VM (right click, close, power off), right click, select Settings, select System on the left, click on Acceleration, then clear "Enable VT-x/AMD-V" for hardware virtualization. Click on OK and then execute vagrant up.
  • A less preferred solution is to re-enable it in the BIOS. Warning: BIOS changes can disable your computer. Be very careful in following the steps below, double-checking each step. The followng procedure has only been tested on MSOE laptops; the steps for other computers may differ.
    1. Reboot your computer.
    2. When you get a blank screen, press the Escape key multiple times.
    3. On the first menu, press F10 to get to the BIOS Setup menu.
    4. In the BIOS Setup menu, click on System Configuration and then Device Configurations.
    5. Scroll down to "Virtual Technology" and enable it.
    6. Save changes and exit the BIOS configuration. This should reboot your laptop, and you should now be able to execute vagrant up.
    Note that some MSOE laptops have passwords that prevent you from accessing the BIOS. For those, visit the help desk; it takes just a few minutes for someone to enable VTx and VTd support.

• Vagrant repeatedly reports "ssh: trying to connect" or "Warning: Connection timeout. Retrying..." On MSOE laptops, this probably means that virtual machine support is disabled. See the above steps for enabling Virtual Technology. If you think you have virtualization enabled, you might check: see here for a blog on that or simply download the Intel Processor Identification Utility and check the CPU Technologies tab.

• Virtual Box reports something similar to "NtCreateFile failed: Unknown Status -5657. VBoxDrvStub error: Not signed with the build certificate." This is a bug in VirtualBox. Ticket 16318 states that the fix is to uninstall VirtualBox, reboot your system, and then reinstall it.

• If you get some other error message, do the standard thing: use your favorite web engine to search for "vagrant key words from error message". Vagrant has a strong user community, and there's a good chance your problem is mentioned on Stack Overflow. Let your instructor know if you don't understand a fix that looks like it should help.