Creating your own base box for vagrant is a great thing to do, you get to undestand exactly what is on that box and to choose exactly what base OS you use.

After all one of the big draws of vagrant is keeping your dev environment close to what production looks like - and for that you need to know what is in the base box.

When I first started using vagrant I wrote a post How to build a Centos 6 base Box for vagrant whcih details the manual steps needed. At the time I was busy learning puppet, vagrant and related tools - veewee was just one tool too many and a manual build seemed the best way to get my head around what a base box was.

While the base box isn’t something I have needed to repeat much, it is beneficial to update the base image from time to time and here veewee is brilliant. It also makes shareing the reponnsbibility for the base box within a team easy.

Here’s what I did

I had a centos VM that I hadn’t used in a while, I think I cloned it from another version.

When I came to use it again I had no network andtrying to start the network I got the error message in the title.

There seem to be a few issues

I just read an interesting article about Windows 7 - it will include a virtual machine to run windows XP for backwards compatibility.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9132177

The article points out that this has the drawback of extra maintenance.

As well as following standards such as those laid down by www.w3.org I always try and test websites I develop across a range of browsers. Despite improvements in compatibility in recent years, browsers do still vary in implementation and even relatively minor browsers are still used by large numbers of people.

However all this testing can be hard to keep on top of and sometimes I just have to push out what seems like a small code change with only limited testing.

I’m aiming to automate as much testing as possible, this is a little more work up front - but makes re-running tests trivial and so more likely to happen.

I decided to upgrade  VirtualBox because the newer versions have much better support for networks that allow virtual computer to be visible on the real network.

But after upgrade I encountered the error

HostInterface’: The attribute ’name’ is required but missing.

It seems others have had similar issues

One of the trial of web development is ensuring that your site works across a range of browsers.

Standards compliance is an important part of this - but testing cannot be avoided.

I work on Ubuntu, and use VirtualBox together with a licensed copy of Windows XP to test in a Windows environment, which also allows me to at least test the Windows version of Safari.