Anyone able to help with my VIP Quickstart problem?

If you don’t know what VIP Quickstart is then this post is not intended for you πŸ™‚

Edit: I’ve been reading the Varying Vagrant Vagrants page, which says that version 4.2.16 of Virtualbox is incompatible with Vagrant. That is the exact version of Virtualbox which I’m using right now, so I’ll try downgrading and see how it goes.

Edit 2: Upgrading Virtualbox to 4.2.18 did not help with VIP Quickstart, but I tried VVV instead which seems to be working perfectly.

I’m having difficulties getting VIP Quickstart running on my main Ubuntu machine. I ended up doing a complete OS reinstall in the hope that my clear out whatever was intially causing me problems (I’d been planning to reformat at some time anyway).

I set everything back up and as per my normal procedure, I installed Nginx, MySQL and PHP to get my regular local server up and running. Then later, I attempted to install VIP Quickstart. I had the latest version of VirtualBox running, but it told me I needed an older version as the new one wasn’t compatible, so I downgraded to 1.2.x. That didn’t help, so I upgraded Vagrant to the very latest one (rather than the one provided by the Ubuntu software center).

I now get the following error message when I attempt to run ./bin/vip-init:

 

Timed out while waiting for the machine to boot. This means that
Vagrant was unable to communicate with the guest machine within
the configured ("config.vm.boot_timeout" value) time period. This can
mean a number of things.

If you're using a custom box, make sure that networking is properly
working and you're able to connect to the machine. It is a common
problem that networking isn't setup properly in these boxes.
Verify that authentication configurations are also setup properly,
as well.

If the box appears to be booting properly, you may want to increase
the timeout ("config.vm.boot_timeout") value.
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
[default] VirtualBox VM is already running.
[default] Running provisioner: shell...
The private key to connect to the machine via SSH must be owned
by the user running Vagrant. This is a strict requirement from
SSH itself. Please fix the following key to be owned by the user
running Vagrant:

/home/ryan/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key

damnit

To try and help debug, I setup a blank Vagrant server without using VIP Quickstart and it seems to be working just fine. I can SSH into it and it is working as expected, whereas the VIP Quickstart installation won’t even boot the server.

I guessed that my regular local server may be causing problems, so I stopped Nginx, PHP and MySQL, but that didn’t seem to help either.


Today I tried to use my regular (non Vagrant) local server, and discovered that MySQL will no longer start. I’m assuming that is an unrelated issue, but am not certain (hopefully one of you will know more).
– this was fixed courtesy of the super helpful Amy Hendrix πŸ™‚

Soooo … any ideas on where I should start debugging this?

My only thought right now is that I could reformat the whole drive from scratch again and hope that running a local server alongside Vagrant was causing some sort of glitch, but that is a royal pain in the neck and I’d rather fix whatever is wrong if possible.

wiley-coyote-help

What to do with a naked man

What is the most appropriate response to the following scenario …

You wake up to hear crashing and bashing in your apartment. You figure one of your flatmates is just drunk and ignore it. The bashing goes on for a while. You keep ignoring it. Then someone walks straight into your room (no knocking, just walks in), you realise you don’t know who it is, so you say “Hello? Who the fuck is that?”, to which the response from a mans voice says “Ahhh, I’m trying to get into that room” and they point towards your male flatmates bedroom. You then say “Get the fuck out of my room” to which they say “heyyy, chilll, I can’t get into the room can I can get in through (gestures towards your wall)”. At this point you realise the man is only wearing a pair of underpants. And you go on to say (more aggressively) “GET THE FUCK OUT NOWWWW!!”, at which point they disgruntedly leave your room. You then try to go back to sleep. But then you hear them talking to someone in another part of the house, and definitely not in the bedroom they were trying to get into, so you get up just in case he’s up to mischief and check on what’s happening.

You then find the mostly naked man standing in your female flatmates room talking to her. So you ask her if she knows him and she says “No. I have no idea who he is.”. So you demand he leaves, which he seems to object to, but you be more insistent, then he leaves the room. You then tell him to get out of the hallway to clear him out of her way, then ask him what he is doing and why is there, to which he says he is trying to get into the same room he pointed to before. You ask him why, and he says his friend is staying there. Then you ask him “which friend?”, but the name he says isn’t familiar. So you ask him why he is in the apartment and he says he knows one of the girls who lives there, so you ask him why he’s trying to get into a particular room, to which he says he knows the girl that lives in there (but it is of course a males room that he is pointing to). You then ask him exactly who it is that he knows in this apartment and he says he can’t remember the name of the person.

No one else appears to be home.

At this point, what is the most appropriate course of action?

(I actually had to deal with this scenario earlier this morning)

Vigilantism

If people had the right to seek vengeance for things they saw as an injustice, society would become a very scary place. You may feel you are justified in seeking vengeance upon others, but I’m sure others feel justified in seeking vengeance for things you would not agree with. I recommend not setting an example for those whose moral compass does not align with your own. At least the justice system is “trying” to get it right.

batman-fat

Kristall weiss

I’m currently sitting in a teeny tiny pub in Bonn (Germany), drinking something called a Kristall weiss, which according to the bar tender is apparently like a regular weissbier, but it’s filtered so it doesn’t have the cloudy weissbier thing going on. Imma starting to feel a little drunk πŸ˜‰

Kristallweisse beer

Kristallweisse beer

Ross Ulbricht, alleged owner of Silk Road has been arrested

At 29 years of age, Ross William Ulbricht has been charged with running Silk Road.

What confuses me, is that these are supposedly the ways he got caught. All of which seem like trivial things that he should never have been doing.

  • He avertised Silk Road on drug forums and bitcointalk.org with the username β€œaltoid”, then eight months later used the same username whilst looking for developers, along with his personal email address.
  • The FBI used a seized web server to track through a VPN to an IP address at a coffee shop near a friend of his.
  • USA customs found a package containing nine counterfeit ID’s, all of which had photos of Ross Ulbricht, but with different names.
  • He posted a question using his real name on Stack Overflow about using Tor hidden services using Curl in PHP, then changed his name a few minutes later.

Here is a snapshot from his LinkedIn page, in case it is taken down at some point.
ross-ulbricht