Avoid VirtualBox and becoming trapped in the non-free & personal use only extension by using one of the very decent open source alternatives Boxes[1] or virt-manager[2]
You have a very broad definition of "phishing".
That would certainly look a lot like phishing
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Wha?
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.
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.
>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.
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 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 literally fishing
You can "fish for info" in a hundred ways. Only a small subset of that is "phishing".
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.
Of course others are right, virt-manager is probably a better replacement I think.
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.
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.
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.
How exactly are you trapped by using GPL software?
I'd argue the added features themselves are mostly shit. If you need hypervisor RDP or FDE there are much better solutions than VirtualBox.
> 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.
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.
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.
I have the impression that causes some pain when it starts eating away battery faster than the monitor can charge the laptop.
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...
Have they improved?
Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I've never has success with non-windows OS's.
(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)
Otherwise, don't you have to do everything by hand to configured xrdp on the Linux guest?
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...
Until today I had never even heard of the Extension pack, and have never had any need to use it.
How is the state of KVM's support about 3D acceleration, sound, drag'n drop and like?
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.
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.
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.
I've been using it in my KVM PCI passthrough VM for some months and it works well.
> 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.
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!
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 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?