NOTE: check the vboxcontrol section for up to date information. This article is a bit stale.
Today, uptime of Far Fewer Toes suffered. That’s because we’ve bought a new computer to host the site on. Previously, we were hosting on an old Pentium III 600, which badly needed a replacement. We also needed to free up another box, in order to use it for real reviews and tests (as opposed to in VirtualBox).
Yesterday evening and today I’ve been working on setting everything up, and this site is now hosted in a VirtualBox instance on the new machine: an AMD Athlon64 x2 4400+ with 4 GB of RAM.
Now, VirtualBox doesn’t come with some kind of init script to automatically start all virtual machines on boot of the host, and after searching how others solved this problem, i stumbled on the blog of Mandriva’s Adam Williamson. He has written a blog post containing among other things the required steps to set up VirtualBox with host-based networking.
His post didn’t cover how to start everything on boot of the host machine, and shutting down VirtualBox and all virtual machines gracefully on reboot or shutting down of the host. …click here to read more