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2,688 Views 5 Replies Last post: Feb 8, 2010 6:15 AM by benhengx

benhengx

4 posts since
Feb 3, 2010

Currently Being Moderated

Feb 4, 2010 12:08 AM

OpenVista Appliance not work on my virtualbox??

Hi,

I'm a newcomer to OpenVista, and just tried the OpenVista Appliance for a first feel, but seems it does not work, anyone can help me, thanks in advance.

My host is ubuntu desktop edition 9.10, my virtualbox version is 3.1.2, I downloaded the image 'OpenVista-Appliance-r5.7z' from the OpenVista sourceforge site.

With the help of 'OpenVista Appliance works great on VirtualBox 3.0.4', I successfully loaded the virtual machine image, and the xubuntu started up succesfully, I then tried to open the 'OpenVista CIS' on the desktop, and it run to tell me to login, I tried all the OpenVista users listed in the 'README' (like PU1234/PU1234!!), but none of them work, and the OpenVista CIS always responses a big red alert to me (see attachment). I thought maybe the OpenVista server not start, I then open a terminal, and run command: 'ps -ef | grep -i mumps', and the outputs shows two processes are running like '/opt/openvista/open/gtm/mumps -direct'.

I know the appliance image is built with VMWare, and maybe it's a virtual machine issue, I'll give another try with VMWare Player.

Attachments:

Screenshot.png (83.1 K)

Tags: virtualbox

benhengx

4 posts since
Feb 3, 2010

Currently Being Moderated

1. Feb 4, 2010 1:22 AM

in response to: benhengx

Re: OpenVista Appliance not work on my virtualbox??

After tried it with VMWare Player, it can work, so seems the Appliance does not work on VirtualBox on Ubuntu Desktop 9.10

Ben Mehling

126 posts since
Jul 24, 2008

Currently Being Moderated

2. Feb 4, 2010 4:48 PM

in response to: benhengx

Re: OpenVista Appliance not work on my virtualbox??

I am surprised to hear the software running inside of the VM itself behaves differently depending on which vm engine you use... Perhaps it's an issue of keyboard bindings in one vs. the other.

I personally have only ever run the appliance r5 in Virtual Box, so I know it does work.

This post also received a reply on Twitter (thanks @ebennick):

@medsphereorg It works great on Xen too, just convert the vmware image into a raw with qemu command!

benhengx

4 posts since
Feb 3, 2010

Currently Being Moderated

3. Feb 5, 2010 2:22 AM

in response to: benhengx

Re: OpenVista Appliance not work on my virtualbox??

Today I tried again with VitualBox, after the first time Xubunut starts up, I got the same problem as yesterday, that is I cannot login to the OpenVista CIS, after compared with the working VMWare based appliance, I found that although the OpenVista server seems started (I can see the mumps process), it actually didn't bind to the port 9201 from output of 'netstat', so I think maybe it's a networking problem. I reconfigured the network of the virtual machine, set the NIC to 'bridge' mode, and assign it a static IP and restart xubuntu, now it works.

I want to make sure this problem is caused by the default VirtualBox 'NAT' networking mode and DHCP of network config, so I revert the network config to it and restart, and it didn't work immediately. From the output of 'ps', I can see the "mumps -run ^ZSTART", I know it's from the /etc/init.d/openvista, seems it hangs for some reason. I didn't look much detail into it, and reconfig it to the working mode (bridge mode and static IP), but it didn't work as I expected, I have no idea about it, after several system restart, at last the OpenVista works.

From today's try, I think the problem maybe caused by OpenVista startup script, maybe it depends on some prior service (like apache), but as ubuntu uses upstart (I'm not familiar with upstart), so there maybe a race condition that causes the OpenVista script hangs there. Anyone can give some ideas about it, thanks.

Jonathan Tai

341 posts since
Jul 24, 2008

Currently Being Moderated

4. Feb 7, 2010 1:08 PM

in response to: benhengx

Re: OpenVista Appliance not work on my virtualbox??

Thanks for tracking this down... the info you provided is very helpful. The ZSTART routine just starts the RPC broker, which just tries to bind to a port. I can't think of any reason why Bridged vs. NAT would matter to the guest OS -- in both cases, it should just be getting an IP address via DHCP. Maybe (and this is a shot in the dark), in NAT mode, the DHCP server takes longer to respond, so the openvista init script is somehow run before networking is started? I know that Ubuntu uses upstart, but my understanding was that there was a upstart job that executed init scripts, so they should work just fine. Could you maybe modify the openvista init script to log the output of "ifconfig" to a temp file?

There are no explicit dependencies on Apache. Apache doesn't come into play until you connect using CIS. CIS then requests the imaging URL from the server over an RPC, then makes a direct connection out to Apache. The server is never directly involved with Apache.

benhengx

4 posts since
Feb 3, 2010

Currently Being Moderated

5. Feb 8, 2010 6:15 AM

in response to: benhengx

Re: OpenVista Appliance not work on my virtualbox??

Hi Jonathan, thanks for your comment, I tried as you suggested, but I don't think I got a satisfied answer. I log the output of 'ifconfig -a' to a tmp file in the script '/etc/init.d/openvista' (in function run_hook and before running mumps -run '^ZSTART'). And then I tried restarting the system several times, the output of 'ifconfig' shows that no differences between the working/non-working OpenVista mode, as I can observe the two cases (IP is configured and not configured) under both modes.

In one of my OpenVista appliance environments (the one that experiences the problem more frequently), I changed the '/etc/init.d/openvista' script a little as follows:

# Required-Start: $all openvista-databases $network

After added the '$network' keyword, I didn't experience such problem again, but I cannot say that's a reliable workaround, as I do not have a deep understanding of upstart and didn't test it sufficiently.

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