• If your install becomes stuck on SSH auth method: private key for more than three minutes, then what you can do is open Virtual Box, navigate to your VM, and click the green “Show” button. Having the VM’s terminal GUI open can seem to keep it awake for communication. While developing on Submitty, this “Show” terminal option can sometimes lead to the VM being faster with loads, so it may be worth having the GUI open even after your vagrant up.

• If your install seems to randomly freeze during vagrant up with no explanation, then there are a couple of things that may be going wrong:

  Note: If this happens, it may be worth running a simple vagrant destroy before you try to vagrant up again. It is possible to repair, but it is usually more effort than it is worth.

  • First, check to make sure you have a solid internet connection. Even if the connection is fast, it may experience drop-outs every once in a while, so it is highly recommended to install it with a wired connection to the internet.

  • Secondly, check to make sure your computer is not going to sleep, this can be changed in settings for some systems, or you can install a program to keep it awake (for example, amphetamine on Mac).

• If an error is thrown during vagrant up, you may need to uninstall Virtual Box and all virtual machines by typing the following commands:

  CAUTION: This should only be done if you do not have any other virtual machines.

  To remove Virtual Box type:

   sudo apt-get remove --purge virtualbox
  

  To remove all virtual machines and configuration files type:

   sudo rm ~/"VirtualBox VMs" -Rf
   sudo rm ~/.config/VirtualBox/ -Rf
  

  This will delete all virtual machine settings. Then install the latest version of Virtual Box and vagrant from the links given in step 3 (using Ubuntu Software).

• If it has been a while since your last vagrant destroy and vagrant up you may need to update/upgrade/reinstall the virtual box, vagrant, and the installed boxes on your system:

  For example, on Mac:

    brew reinstall --cask virtualbox
    brew reinstall --cask vagrant
    vagrant plugin update
    vagrant box update
  

  If you continue to have errors on Mac with vagrant up after reinstalling virtualbox and vagrant, check “System Preferences” -> “Security & Privacy”. You may need to approve/reapprove “Allow apps download from”. You may also need to restart your computer.

  Similar instructions for other OS.

• If this error is thrown during vagrant up command:

   ubuntu-26.84: E: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gcc-9gcc-9_9.4.0-1ubuntu1-20.84.1_amd64.deb Connection fail [IP: 189.211.241.193]
  

  then you should use VPN to connect to the internet and then try vagrant up.This error usually occurs when you are outside the United States and the connection to the Ubuntu package repository is being blocked or restricted.

  Note: The IP address provided in the error message may vary. ProtonVPN, which provides free VPN service can be used. You can download from their official website at (https://protonvpn.com). You can also use other VPN services.

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Forwarded Port Already in Use

• If you see an error similar to:

  Vagrant cannot forward the specified ports on this VM, since they
  would collide with some other application that is already listening
  on these ports. The forwarded port to #### is already in use
  on the host machine.
  

  This means that one or more of the ports requested by vagrant is already in use by another application running on your computer.

• This may happen if you attempt to create multiple Submitty VMs – perhaps unintentionally! E.g., if you have multiple directories on your computer each with a clone/copy of the Submitty repo. It is necessary to run vagrant destroy in each of these directories/repositories to clean up unwanted VMs.

  The following command can help locate misplaced repositories/VMs:

  vagrant global-status
  

• If you might have old, forgotten VMs from previous OS versions hanging around it can be helpful to completely delete the .vagrant folder in your repository. Also check to see if you have multiple clones or backups of the repository and thus multiple .vagrant folders on your machine.

• You can scan to see what processes on your machine are using the conflicting ports. Depending on your operating system, try these commands:

  netstat -anvp tcp | awk 'NR<3 || /LISTEN/'
  

  lsof -i | grep LISTEN
  

  Then you can type kill <pid> with the <pid> of the process (if you confirm you don’t need that process). If you don’t recognize the process using the port in question, search to figure out if you can or should disable it. For example, on MacOS, the AirPlay Receiver in Control Center is using port 7000, so you may choose to turn that off.

• You can choose to override the default ports and use an alternate port through an environment variable. The current variables are VM_PORT_SITE, VM_PORT_WS, VM_PORT_DB, VM_PORT_SAML, and VM_PORT_SSH.

  For example, if the conflicting port is the default site port (1511), and you want to use port 1512 instead:

  VM_PORT_SITE=1512 vagrant up
  

  You can alternatively create a .env file in the root of your project with the text VM_PORT_SITE=1512 (and any other variables separated by newlines). Note that you will need to install the env plugin beforehand:

  vagrant plugin install vagrant-env
  

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Host-Only / Static Networking

If you are having trouble being able to view the Submitty webpage after a vagrant up you might need to modify the interfaces in your VM. To fix this:

As root modify /etc/network/interfaces and add:

# The host-only network interface
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.56.101
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.56.0
broadcast 192.168.56.255

References and useful links: https://gist.github.com/pjdietz/5768124 and http://christophermaier.name/2010/09/01/host-only-networking-with-virtualbox/