Slightly improve gitian building guide #5527

Michagogo commented at 10:52 PM on December 22, 2014: contributor

Change the gitian building guide such that it modifies the VirtualBox NAT setting (to 192.168.11/24, to make @gavinandresen happy) rather than overriding Gitian's default IP address in ways that may or may not have broken/break in the future, considering how fickle/fragile/volatile Gitian is. Once we're using vboxmanage anyway, replace the multi-step process of adding the port forwarding rule (and 2 images) with the one-line command to do the same thing.

Note that this guide may not work in other ways, for other reasons -- for example, with the new depends system, stuff may need to change. I haven't gotten around to looking at the changes to gitian building in depth, so I don't know how much needs to be fixed/rewritten.

Slightly improve gitian building guide

Change the gitian building guide such that it modifies the VirtualBox NAT
setting (to 192.168.11/24, to make @gavinandresen happy) rather than
overriding Gitian's default IP address in ways that may or may not have
broken/break in the future, considering how fickle/fragile/volatile Gitian
is. Once we're using vboxmanage anyway, replace the multi-step process of
adding the port forwarding rule (and 2 images) with the one-line command
to do the same thing.

Note that this guide may not work in other ways, for other reasons -- for
example, with the new depends system, stuff may need to change. I haven't
gotten around to looking at the changes to gitian building in depth, so I
don't know how much needs to be fixed/rewritten.
[skip ci]

5cd47659fe

Michagogo force-pushed on Dec 22, 2014

Michagogo commented at 12:06 AM on December 23, 2014: contributor

Ah, I see @laanwj spotted that in #5426 and @theuni addresses it in #5512.

in doc/gitian-building.md:None in 5cd47659fe

  82 | @@ -83,24 +83,17 @@ Unixy OSes by entering the following in a terminal:
  83 |  
  84 |  After creating the VM, we need to configure it. 
  85 |  
  86 | -- Click the `Settings` button, then go to the `Network` tab. Adapter 1 should be attacked to `NAT`.
  87 | +For this step, we'll be using the `vboxmanage` command-line tool. On Linux or OS X this should be in your PATH,

btcdrak commented at 8:31 AM on December 23, 2014:

I think command line as an alternative is great, but shouldn't remove the GUI instructions also.

btcdrak commented at 8:32 AM on December 23, 2014: contributor

NACK on removing GUI instructions. Fine to add command line instructions as an alternative, but not as exclusive.

laanwj commented at 1:20 PM on December 23, 2014: member

The problem, @btcdrak, is that changing the IP range of NAT networking is not possible through the GUI. That's why I went with changing gitian's range instead when writing this document.

In principle this is the cheap way out, it would be better to investigate why gitian's networking is not working for many people following this guide (where did the regression happen?) Then again everything is preferable to having it broken.

laanwj added the label Docs and Output on Dec 23, 2014

jgarzik removed the label Docs and Output on Dec 31, 2014

laanwj commented at 4:17 PM on January 2, 2015: member

@jgarzik Why did you remove the "Docs and output" label here? This concerns documentation so that would be the appropriate label.

jgarzik commented at 4:28 PM on January 2, 2015: contributor

@laanwj Odd. It is most likely a mis-click.

jgarzik added the label Docs and Output on Jan 2, 2015

theuni commented at 3:06 AM on February 4, 2015: member

@Michagogo on OSX, this is "VBoxManage" rather than "vboxmanage". I'd really rather not mix gui/cli commands though, let's try to use one or the other.

To change the ip range, I instead created a new Nat Network, set it to 10.0.11.0/24, and bound gitianbuilder to that. All via the GUI, and it seems to work with no issues. Any reason not to use that approach?

laanwj commented at 7:26 AM on February 4, 2015: member

@theuni If you can do it through the GUI, that's way preferable. The only reason for the command-line workaround was that it didn't seem to be possible through the GUI.

Michagogo commented at 10:55 AM on February 4, 2015: contributor

Ah! That keyword is very helpful. Did some Googling... Looks like it can be done with the GUI, but the trick is that you need to go to the global Virtualbox preferences, and create a new "NAT Network", where you can (among other things) set the address range. Once you've done that, you can attach the individuals VMs to that network. A very counterintuitive way to do that, if you ask me. @laanwj want to try it and update the guide? I'd do it, but I'm on my phone and don't know when I'll be able to get around to it, and also I'm on Windows, so the GUI looks different. Better to keep it consistent. @theuni Good catch!

Michagogo commented at 10:58 AM on February 4, 2015: contributor

@theuni Also, it's VBoxManage on Windows too, but that's case insensitive. I changed it to lowercase after someone said that on Linux (iirc) it's lowercase, and I tested on a Mac and found that there was a symlink from the lowercase to the capitalized one.

theuni commented at 4:06 AM on February 5, 2015: member

@Michagogo I can update it, since it seems like that's cross-platform friendly. Will do.

laanwj closed this on Mar 16, 2015

Michagogo deleted the branch on Jun 25, 2015

MarcoFalke locked this on Sep 8, 2021