Error building main Guest Additions Module while installing VirtualBox guest additions

The headline above refers to a message I’ve just received during the installation of the integration services on Ubuntu 13.10 (64 bit running on the latest VirtualBox 4.3.8)

The solution is found here. In short:

In a terminal

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r` dkms

Then re-install VirtualBox Guest Addition from Devices > Install guest addition.

 

Allowing VirtualBox host OS to access network via VPN

Running a guest OS is very useful (for example to setup sandboxing test environments). The guest OS can be configured to use NAT to access the network of the host machine (the default setting).

When working on VPN however, the guest will not be able to access the DNS. There are quite some articles with this topic, but I found this one as a working solution:

http://superuser.com/questions/570984/virtualbox-guest-ubuntu-loses-dns-when-host-connects-to-vpn

To C:\...\VirtualBox\VBoxManage modifyvm "VM name" --natdnshostresolver1 on

The explanation is in the VirtualBox manual of VBoxManage modifyvm

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html

--natdnshostresolver<1-N> on|off: This option makes the NAT engine use the host’s resolver mechanisms to handle DNS requests (please see Section 9.11.5, “Enabling DNS proxy in NAT mode” for details).

Using VirtualBox shared folders on Ubuntu guest OS

Installing the virtualbox gues additions enables sharing folders between host and guest. But unfortunately for Ubuntu it gives some head scratching, as it does not work immediately.

To fix the problem you need to add the current user to the vboxsf group (the group which have access to the shared folders). You can do that simply as

~$ sudo usermod -a -G vboxsf yourusername

Deploying to an alternate maven repository

In some cases you may decide to setup a staging maven repository, which is different to the one you set up in the distributionManagement section of your pom.

This can be done by configuring a profile in $HOME/.m2/settings.xml like this:

        <profile>
          <id>deploy-to-local-repo-snapshot</id>
          <properties>
            <altDeploymentRepository>local-repo-snapshot::default::http://localhost:8081/nexus/content/repositories/snapshots</altDeploymentRepository>
          </properties>
        </profile>

You need to provide the password for the server (in this case nexus oss)

       <server>
            <id>local-repo-snapshot</id>
            <username>someuser</username>
            <password>somepass</password>
        </server>

Then you can activate the profile when deploying with maven like this:

$ mvn -Pdeploy-to-local-repo-snapshot deploy

Also remember, that if your normal repository is behind a proxy, then in the proxy settings section you should exclude localhost, otherwise the deploy fails with Return code is: 503