Hi again, folks.

Based on our conversation at the Community call today, we split the feedback regarding the network problems into two different things: 

1) Get a GPU passthrough for NVIDIA to work on a virtual setup with VirtualBox. I don't have anything that I can add here, but would love to hear from others 🙂

2) Correctly set up networking for VirtualBox setup.

On this second topic, I want to provide some additional info. If you had at any point a working StarlingX setup with VirtualBox (either using the recently merged automated guide or manually installing with the canonical guides) and you're now having problems accessing services running in the VM(s) it could be this: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/20337#comment:1.

In order to figure this out, I check if there's anything listening, on my host, in a port that I know is set up with a port forward in VirtualBox's NatNetwork (8080, for example): 

netstat -tunlp | grep 8080

If I don't get anything back from that, I then try to restart the NatNetworks with (notice that NatNetwork is the name of the Nat Network that is assigned to one of the VM's network adapters): 

vboxmanage natnetwork stop --netname NatNetwork
vboxmanage natnetwork start --netname NatNetwork

If after that the "netstat" is still not showing anything listening on ports that are forwarded between the host and the VM(s), then I also try to recreate the Nat Network from scratch (that worked already at least twice for me):

vboxmanage natnetwork remove --netname NatNetwork || true
vboxmanage natnetwork add --netname NatNetwork --dhcp off --network 10.10.10.0/24
vboxmanage natnetwork modify --netname NatNetwork --port-forward-4 "SSH:tcp:[]:3122:[10.10.10.3]:22"
vboxmanage natnetwork modify --netname NatNetwork --port-forward-4 "HTTP:tcp:[]:8080:[10.10.10.3]:8080"
... and so on.

If this is the case with your setup, I'm sorry. I know how frustrating this is and that's why I'm trying to follow up with the VirtualBox community (both on https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/20337 and https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/19651).

If not, please let us know and share more details here 🙂.

Regards,
--
Bruno.
From: Ildiko Vancsa <ildiko@openinfra.dev>
Sent: Tuesday, August 8, 2023 19:56
To: Bruno Drugowick Muniz <Bruno.Muniz@encora.com>
Cc: StarlingX ML <starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io>
Subject: Re: [Starlingx-discuss] User feedback and questions
 
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Hi Bruno,

Thank you for the quick comments.

A few notes in line.

> […]
>
> Hi, Ildikó and StarlingX Community.
>
> I'll add my 2 cents regarding their feedback.
>
> >    - The networking setup has been hard to figure out for StarlingX, they found that it's not very well documented.
> >    + Is it in the roadmap to document the networking setup for StarlingX with more details?
>
> Regarding the above, the Docs team recently discussed a problem with the Virtual guides being outdated when compared to the bare metal guides. If someone was following the Virtual guides, it could partially account for their confusion. This problem is being tracked as a bug and it's actively being discussed in the Docs team meetings. While I don't represent the Docs team, I participated in the discussion, and I'm assigned to this bug while awaiting the resolution of other blocking factors. The bug in question can be found here: https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbugs.launchpad.net%2Fstarlingx%2F%2Bbug%2F2028272&data=05%7C01%7CBruno.Muniz%40encora.com%7C9439c06058ad4fcfd01108db9862bfe9%7C1e0c92b0f1bd441ebbe6c778f9ced553%7C0%7C0%7C638271322132779517%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=a%2FbPhdkTmLoXT83DCMqAQpvrau4DkcpldQqswm9PmX4%3D&reserved=0.
>
> Therefore, even though there might be additional problems not covered by this bug, addressing the concern with the Virtual guides is indeed part of the community's plan.

[Ildiko] That is great to hear, thank you for the updates!

>
> Regarding the query below:
>
> >    + Would it be possible to automate the creation of networks for the platform? Especially for the virtual deployment option, since that is most commonly deployed by new users, who are evaluating the platform.
>
> I'm not sure I fully understand what exactly they meant by "automate the creation of networks for the platform". Could we gather more specific details on this?
>
> […]

[Ildiko] While we did not go into deep details on this during our conversation. The person said that the L2 network setup is fine, but the L3 is a bit lacking in terms of setting up NAT, bridges, etc. I’m not sure if the comments were maybe specific to the duplex system or just in general applicable to either virtual deployment options. Does this help?

Thanks,
Ildikó

———

Ildikó Váncsa
Director of Community
Open Infrastructure Foundation