Even worse: Oracle is going around and threatening to sue enterprises that show traffic to the extensions download site from their IP blocks. Happened recently at a previous employer of mine.

Solution: null route *.oracle.com.

Any public references for this anywhere?

Personal anecdote: They came after us, since the extension phones home and they could track it to our ASN. Asked us for an audit of all installs of VB. The idea was that they wanted to then charge us big money for a corporate license.

Instead, IT banned it enterprise-wide. Which is sad, because we like it for Vagrant. We've since started moving all of our developer stuff to OpenShift, so we're not totally up a creek.

Oh, wow. They've also changed the license a couple of times in 2016 and 2017 to make it more restrictive.

Early 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160411070811/https://www.virtu... Late 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20161208112443/https://www.virtu... Current, last changed July 2017: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox_PUEL

In the earlier licenses, "personal use" was just defined as the person using it being the same person as who installed it, and only one person remotely accessing the desktop at a time. So I had interpreted this as being OK for developer VMs in which the developer installs it themselves and uses it for their own development purposes. It also contained an "evaluation use" with a vaguely defined period.

The current license now defines "personal use" as explicitly non-commercial use, and adds more restrictions on client access that applies to any type of clients and not just remote desktop access, as well as explicitly defining the evaluation use period to being 30 days.

So while I didn't really have a concern about developers using VirtualBox with the extension pack previously, given the new license and the fact that they seem to be enforcing it via phoning home, it looks like it's time to set a policy of no one using it.

Luckily, we've already pretty much transitioned everything over to libvirt/KVM on Linux hosts, and people have generally been using VMWare or VMWare Fusion on Windows and Mac hosts.

I have a devops guy trying to push me to use Vagrant at the moment, but I am aware of these issues with virtualbox. I was thinking about using one of the lxc shims, but now you have me curious, how useful is openshift in that "I want to spin local vms up for testing" approach? I thought it was much more geared to server and not workstation, as opposed to vagrant.

Of course others are right, virt-manager is probably a better replacement I think.

So OpenShift (or OKD) is just Redhat's Kubernetes platform. If your dev team isn't already in a docker-like workflow, it's going to be a hard sell. I've found many devops-y people love to be able to SSH into the environment to change code as it runs, and that's not possible with an environment like this.

You can spin up KVMs in OpenShift, but I have the feeling it's not going to be quite what you're looking for. I suppose it's all going to be a matter of what workflow is most comfortable for your devops people. If you have an OpenStack install, Vagrant can control those AND they can login and poke around.

Also FYI virt-manager is deprecated in RHEL 8, and is superceded by Cockpit.

Out of curiosity, what feature in the extension pack are you using with Vagrant?

USB pass through support to drive hardware debuggers here.

PXE booting mostly.

Why not use KVM via vagrant-libvirt? It's pretty easy to set up and works like a charm. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727059

So one problem with that is not all of our team uses Linux, we're a Mac/Linux hybrid team. Our workflow was to edit the puppet manifests locally and then Vagrant up, and we wanted something that would work across different dev machines. However, the fussiness of environment setup started to go higher the further we got from VBox; our team didn't really want to invest time into a workflow that was supposed to be an intermediate step to our "end game" development pipeline, so we just left it. Thanks for the link though!

You can have mixed provider vagrant files.

I don't know of any public references, but I can confirm this is happening to government entities as well. Oracle is being extremely aggressive and mounting what is essentially a phishing campaign against organizations that it sees accessing the extension download page. They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle.

>Oracle is being extremely aggressive and mounting what is essentially a phishing campaign against organizations that it sees accessing the extension download page. They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle.

You have a very broad definition of "phishing".

Spamming employees with officious emails and hoping one of them is dumb enough to respond with pertinent information that subverts them or their organization is the textbook definition of phishing. What does it mean to you?

from wikipedia:

>Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication

"using virtualbox" isn't sensitive information. I haven't read the emails, but I doubt Oracle is disguising themselves as the company's IT department or something.

If you don't think information that subjects an entity to massive legal liability is sensitive, then I really don't understand where you're coming from.

The entire point of these emails is to bypass established channels by getting random employees to leak information. If they want licensing information, there's an IT point of contact for that. Or Contracts. Or Legal. They are literally fishing for information leakage that would give them grounds to sue.

> I doubt Oracle is disguising themselves as the company's IT department or something.

They wouldn't. At this stage the point is to convey a false sense of authority without being outright fraud. You have to wrap everything in vague but threatening insinuations-- "help us or you could face fines of up to a bazillion dollars, and/or you might go to JAIL."

The key words are fraudulently and by disguising as a trustworthy entity. If they clearly identify themselves as oracle, asking about virtualbox usage, then it's not phishing.

> They are literally fishing

You can "fish for info" in a hundred ways. Only a small subset of that is "phishing".

>If you don't think information that subjects an entity to massive legal liability is sensitive, then I really don't understand where you're coming from.

The employees were already subjecting their company to legal liability when they were using unlicensed software.

>The entire point of these emails is to bypass established channels by getting random employees to leak information. If they want licensing information, there's an IT point of contact for that. Or Contracts. Or Legal. They are literally fishing for information leakage that would give them grounds to sue.

So if I'm Oracle and I'm trying to find unlicensed enterprise users, what am I supposed to do? Call up their IT/legal department and hope that they'll investigate for me, and respond with a truthful response? Is Oracle not allowed to investigate on their own for licensing infractions? I feel like the only reason people are up in arms about this is because Oracle is doing it. If some startup was doing this to discover that some big corp was not paying their licensing fees, no one would blink an eye.

>They wouldn't. At this stage the point is to convey a false sense of authority without being outright fraud. You have to wrap everything in vague but threatening insinuations-- "help us or you could face fines of up to a bazillion dollars, and/or you might go to JAIL."

Sure, but cops do the same thing (if not more). I'm not saying either is okay, but both are not "phishing".

> They are e-mailing employees directly and asking them to contact Oracle

That would certainly look a lot like phishing

In this case, I think it's actual fishing...

So 90% of cold-call recruiting/sales is also "phishing"?

I'd say "yes". If a cold-call results in anything than blacklisting the company that called you, you're setting yourself up for failure.

Those are completely different.

One is "Hi my name is XYZ at company ABC. Do you want to talk about our product DEF?" to which you instantly know it's a sales call and how to respond.

The other is specifically emailing employees asking about their use in order to build a case against their employer in the hopes of getting an enterprise agreement or lawsuit out of it. It's far more shady and the actual nature of the communication is not revealed until after the fact. For all the developer knows, it's just a support email from Oracle asking them about how they use their product.

Whether the intent is positive or negative is unrelated to whether it's phishing. You could phish someone's info and then send them a gift basket.

Let me clear it up for you:

"Hello my name is X I would like to sell you Y" is not phishing. It's not asking for any information. It's annoying, sure, but you know how to deal with it and they won't bother continuing when they know you're not interested (ie. by saying no)

"Hello my name is X, I work at Oracle, do you have a few minutes to talk about your use of VirtualBox" followed by asking questions about how you use it in order to build a case against your employer can be perceived as phishing. They are either outright not representing or misrepresenting the purpose of the conversation, and asking for information for purposes other than what you'd expect. It doesn't fit the exact definition in the dictionary, but it's close enough and uses the same sort of tactics that it can easily be considered another example of it.

I don't think the purpose of the conversation matters. It's about if/how you fake your identity and what information/access you collect.

That's why I bring up phishing personal info to send a gift basket. Despite flipping the purpose on its head, it's still phishing.

The misrepresentation of the purpose is what brings it into phishing territory. By misrepresenting the purpose, you're also misrepresenting who you are and what your intentions are.

Something that's already phishing will still be phishing even if the purpose is misrepresented. Something that isn't otherwise phishing, however, can be made into something akin to phishing by misrepresenting the purpose.

> The misrepresentation of the purpose

Incorrect. It's not about purpose. It's about misrepresenting who you are. Oracle is saying they are Oracle. If Oracle is pretending to be someone else, than it's phishing.

What you are describing is not phishing. It's just regular old fishing.

> By misrepresenting the purpose, you're also misrepresenting who you are

Wha?

Maybe this got lost halfway down this comment thread, but the whole point of this being considered phishing-like is that Oracle was emailing individual developers, asking questions about their use. The developers didn't realize so that Oracle can build a case against their employer and accidentally gave away details that Oracle would then use to pressure the employer to get licenses or would outright sue.

Developers likely thought they were speaking to Support, or responding to some kind of survey/questionnaire about their use cases and how they use VirtualBox, when in reality were being misled as to the actual purpose of the conversation.

Just because they were speaking to someone from Oracle as opposed to a third party scammer does not mean that the person they were speaking with didn't misrepresent/fake who they were.

Probably not the strict definition, but they are looking for information from employees they can use as leverage or in a lawsuit against the organization.

I would definitely contact them. But they would not appreciate the reply.

My last enterprise I worked at sent out an announcement that anyone with VirtualBox had to remove it.

What amazed me was when I first started there & asked if I could install it, most everyone was clueless what it even was. So Oracle had to have done some audit that found it, because I don't believe more than 1 or 2 other people would have been using it.

Wow so those enterprises are paying massive money for consultants, Realestate, ms-office/windows, databases, CMS, ERP ... etc But don’t want to pay for using the VB extensions. The horror of it. No sympathy today

I do not understand, Virtual Box is free software, the versions distributed through most common Linux distributions does not contain any non-free components and the binaries on the site are released under the GPLv2. The extensions you mention are a separate download that you explicitly have to download and it is mentioned around the download that they are under a different license.

How exactly are you trapped by using GPL software?

From another comment it sounds like it's the Extension Pack they're going after.

> The VirtualBox Extension Pack is available under the VirtualBox Extension Pack Personal Use and Evaluation License, which is a free license for personal, educational or evaluation use, or an Enterprise License, which is a for-fee license that allows most commercial, non-distribution uses restricted by the PUEL.

Without the extension VirtualBox VMs are pretty much shit.

Extensions add "support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards."

I'd argue the added features themselves are mostly shit. If you need hypervisor RDP or FDE there are much better solutions than VirtualBox.

I don't care much about other features either, but accessing USB devices is often invaluable.

Often? For what kind of device? Input devices don't need to be fast, and storage is usually better off with a shared folder anyway.

There’s lots of other hardware that people use. For example, the usb cable to connect to my BMW needs usb 2.0, and the software only works under Windows XP, so I have a virtual machine for that.

For tools like Vagrant, not at all. They are very useful if you want to attach USB devices directly to the VM, use the built-in webcam and so on, but I've used VirtualBox for years without installing the extension once.

USB 2.0 and 3.0 are not fully supported without the extension pack.

Which again are irrelevant for the common “just for Vagrant” use case.

I have used it for testing on different Windows browsers, to check whether https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font would install correctly, and running some Windows software from my bank. The only time I needed the extensions was when I needed to reflash my Blackberry 10 DevAlpha (whose battery, sadly, is dead - I loved that phone)

How so ? (don't confuse the extension pack with the guest addons though)

Linux only by the looks of things though.

The equivalent on macOS would leverage Hypervisor.framework, like xhyve or Veertu.

https://github.com/machyve/xhyve

https://veertu.com/anka-technology/#hypervisor

I gather that Veertu has (had?) a product called Veertu Desktop and it was open sourced, but they've wiped any mention of it from their website in favor of Anka Flow/Device/Build (commercial license only).

This looks like the source, found in a github repo of someone who works for Cisco. Maybe a former Veertu employee, or just someone who happened to fork a copy before Veertu deleted it? At any rate, I can't find an official Veertu repo anymore. https://github.com/tithomas1/vdhh

Last updates were 2 years ago and the installation instructions say "To Install Veertu Desktop on Mac, please visit veertu.com" which has deleted everything related to Veertu Desktop down to the knowledge base articles with release notes https://twitter.com/veertu_labs/status/818584467954495488

Seems like a pretty thoroughly dead product. Haven't heard of xhyve before, but between the two that's the one worth looking at.

Not only open sourced, but GPLv2'd. Ripe for forking, if one felt so inclined.

Sure but GPLv2 doesn't help you if all copies of the source code are gone, so be sure to grab a copy of that vdhh repo now in case tithomas1 removes his.

I imagine it's not in a working state on current versions of macOS, what with the security changes that Apple makes pretty much every year. But if someone wanted to try to get it going again they certainly could.

Docker for Mac has moved from VirtualBox to the built-in hypervisor.

I have the impression that causes some pain when it starts eating away battery faster than the monitor can charge the laptop.

Hmm, never noticed that; to the contrary, in my practice, Docker's VM eats CPU less aggressively than VirtualBox's.

Indeed, it's called HyperKit[0][1], and it's based straight off xhyve[2].

Also, there's docker-machine-driver-xhyve for people that prefer using docker-machine (like I do) instead of DfM.

[0]: https://github.com/moby/hyperkit

[1]: https://blog.docker.com/2016/05/docker-unikernels-open-sourc...

[2]: https://github.com/moby/hyperkit/tree/master/src/

Last time I tried, reasonably recent kernels (like 4.15 or so) failed to boot under Veertu, for no apparent reason.

Have they improved?

Xhyve looks promising, but it’s really new and at this stage it lacks all but the most basic documentation.

Exactly, I'm upvoting this to prevent poor souls stuck on Windows from looking for these nice solutions...

But can't the poor souls stuck on windows use hyper-v and RDP into the vm?

I tried Hyper-V for a while but I found the network configuration really cumbersome. Therefore I went back to Virtualbox but I should probably request my employer to buy a license for Vmware.

Is it because you switched frequently from one adapter to another (like wifi to ethernet)? Otherwise I don't think I ever had any problem with the network configuration.

In Windows 10, we provide a NAT network option by default. This should work seamlessly even if you switch between WiFi and Ethernet. So even this problem should go away for most people now.

Didn't the NAT get pulled from hyper-V?

I don’t think so. It’s only there by default on client, not server, though.

You need Windows Pro as a guest to RDP.

Not if you use the Virtualbox extension pack to VNC (that's the free/GPL extension pack, not the Oracle one). That will work with anything. Hell, it'll work with a DOS 1.0 guest.

(and yes, it's VNC, not RDP, I believe the oracle extension pack actually allows for Virtualbox to do RDP as well. But you can stay GPL-only and still support headless VNC. I believe phpVirtualbox uses it with beautiful results)

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=85886

Can't you only RDP (and here is the qualifier) out-of-the-box with an "Enhanced Guest" VM, like what comes with some of the later Windows 10 builds, like 1809?

Otherwise, don't you have to do everything by hand to configured xrdp on the Linux guest?

Well technically hyper-v comes with its own terminal, but granted it kind of sucks and I wouldn't use continuously.

I think Hyper-V is Windows 8+ (or similar generations of Windows Server), isn't it?

Much of the Windows world is still on Windows 7, and it would be rather ironic if they were updating because of concerns about software phoning home...

Hyper V requires a Windows Pro license last time I checked. That’s significantly more expensive that VirtualBox.

I use hyper-v and rdp every day, very happy with both. I even run Linux VMs in hyper-v.

I've had nothing but issues trying to run Ubuntu in Hyper-V. Even the Windows Ubuntu LTS image that comes with the quick-create didn't work for very long.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I've never has success with non-windows OS's.

What host version? I'm running 18.04 on Server 2016, for reference, did absolutely nothing special or unique, downloaded the iso, built the machine and loaded it and it's up running dns & unifi controller 24/7 for my home network with no issues.

Can you run singularity-container or docker in your Linux guest?

I haven't had reason to try, but I can't imagine a good reason why one couldn't.

I would hope so, as that is what the Win10 version of Docker-for-Windows does.

Yes

Hyper-V only works on the Pro versions of Windows.

WSL has supplanted VirtualBox for actually all of my use cases.

To be clear, VirtualBox and Guest Additions are open source. It is only the Extension Pack which is licensed. No?

Until today I had never even heard of the Extension pack, and have never had any need to use it.

You are correct. It is of note that the extesions pack has a lot of useful add-ons, but you did have to explicitly install it.

We use virt-manager to virtualize servers on servers with joy, however I use VBox to virtualize Windows hosts with hardware acceleration if possible.

How is the state of KVM's support about 3D acceleration, sound, drag'n drop and like?

If you have on the host system a graphics card that you can fully dedicate to the guest system, you can then do pci-passthrough and let the guest system have nearly-full access to that graphic card with nearly full performances.

Also, kvm has some nice features that AFAIK virtual box does not have. For example you can have gnu/linux and windows guests use the balloon memory driver, that basically allocates and deallocates memory from the host system. Imagine having a guest vm where you can say "this vm should have 2GB ram, but it might burst up to 24GB if needed, and then go back to 2GB when the need is satisfied". Can't do that with VBox (AFAIK - and it works on windows too!)

Regarding sound, if you are virtualizing windows, imho you're better off connecting via rdp (avoid remmina, use rdesktop) and using local speakers as audio output.

> you can then do pci-passthrough and let the guest system have nearly-full access to that graphic card with nearly full performances.

It is possible, but when it works and works well, which is not always the case. In addition, one may have to lock the card for usage with the guest only, since drivers may not be compatible with intermittent (=on/off) vfio usage.

I've had mixed experiences, depending on the hardware. my current system is 100% stable, however, I don use the card on the host (it causes instability). My previous system worked badly, and it was essentially not usable.

> If you have on the host system a graphics card that you can fully dedicate to the guest system.

Which implies a special-build system to play some odd Windows games ocassionally, akin to building an Hackintosh. For my use case it's a definitive overkill :D

> ...do pci-passthrough and let the guest system have nearly-full access to that graphic card with nearly full performances.

Again which requires a CPU and system which supports vT-d (in intel jargon), which is the only feature which my 3770K doesn't support :D

VirtualBox supports memory balooning. The interface is same with VirtIO's ballooning drivers AFAIK. The commands can be found in [0].

Since I want to virtualize Windows to play my simpler games only, rdp is not a very attractive choice. Using local speakers and sound virtualization is alright. I don't want crystal clear, high end sound. However, I'm not aware of the support level.

[0]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html

How is pci-passthrough for hypervisor security? I’m speaking from a layman’s perspective, but there have been successful escapes through the GPU / GPU memory in the past right?

Somewhat better than OpenGL passthrough, whose security can be summarized as between "basically none" and "absolutely none".

For sound I would recommend scream: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream

I've been using it in my KVM PCI passthrough VM for some months and it works well.

Virgil3D enables host-gpu based acceleration for KVM, and Boxes ships with it enabled I think.

Virgil 3D is a KVM feature. Boxes is just a frontend. Fedora, CentOS and RH enables it, but it's not landed on Debian yet AFAIK.

From Boxes site:

> While virt-manager does a very good job as a virtual machine management software, it's very much tailored for system administration.

Exactly! Boxes looks really polished.

It's anything but. It's utterly useless. Just use virt-manager while it lasts. It is being deprecated though, after which you will be forced to use boxes or the other virt-manager replacement.

Having never used Boxes before, I was excited for a better VM management tool than virt-manager.

However, I just tried using it (on Debian stretch), and unfortunately I have to agree that it doesn't do much beyond look pretty.

afaict you could only go to consoles, check a few resource usage graphs, send power commands and manage snapshots. There were very few configuration options and no ability to manipulate virtual hardware on existing machines. Also, there was no way to add remote libvirt instances from the GUI, and adding them into the config file (qemu+ssh) just made boxes crash.

If virt-manager really is going to be deprecated, is there a good replacement out there?

edit: Holy crap, it also managed to hibernate all the running VMs on my dev box when it crashed!?! Glad I didn't have anything too important running on it!

It looks like Red Hat intends Cockpit (a web interface) to replace virt-manager eventually.[1]

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1659477

This is somewhat excessive. There are still valid use cases where Virtualbox comes for free - private users or professional users/companies with a relatively small number of workstations (Oracle's going after companies who use a large number of unlicensed installations).

Also, it is still possible to build a free extension pack; it would be a great project. After all, Virtualbox is GPL, and it shouldn't be underestimated the amount of work that has been, and is being, put into it.

I'll try that.

I use Virtualbox to compile CI artifacts for Ubuntu, Debian, OSX (homebrew), and Windows (msys2) by using the virtualbox executor of gitlab.

The other available gitlab-runner executors to build these artifacts cross-flatform are: virtualbox, parallels, docker, kubernetes.

Boxes and virt-manager aren't on that list, so they are out.

Parallels isn't FLOSS.

Can I use docker or kubernetes to build my desired artifacts?

I think the advantage of VB is its installer and ease of creating and spinning up desktop VMs. The last time I tried using virt manager, I decided it wasn't for me, at its then-level of polish, but this was probably back in 2011 or 2012 or something. Boxes seems promising in this regard...hopefully it gets some momentum behind it.

Thank you for providing these links. I've been looking for an alternative to VBox for quite some time (I don't like anything that Oracle touches, as Oracle is a law firm with a tech problem); these help.

Sorry but it could be (even remotely closely) to a Linux only solution.

from memory boxes has limited networking functionality though?

What VM should I use if I’m on macOS?

You make a good point, but not a good recommendation. This is a Mac OS virtualization app, and your options are Linux only. Its an oversight, at best. I get that Apples messed up their evosystem, but that’s not this conversation.

VirtualBox is a cross-platform app. The user interface looks like Java to me.

The UI is written in Qt. E.g. for older VirtualBox versions, the virtualbox-qt package was required to be installed in order to have the GUI.

The UI is Qt-based, I believe.

No, VirtualBox is Windows, Linux, MacOS

Whoops, I forgot.