How to run a JumpBox on VirtualBox
At the risk of having too much box in one title, here’s a 5min hi-def screencast that walks you through the steps involved in making a JumpBox work on Sun’s virtualization product VirtualBox. This is a great win because it provides a free and open source solution for running JumpBoxes on an Intel Mac. The big disclaimer here is:
This is not an officially-supported virtualization technology of JumpBox at this time.
It will typically work (with occasional flakiness in grabbing an IP) but there are a few issues blocking our ability to officially support it. We have it on good authority that these will be resolved in a future version so stay tuned for declaration of official support. Here’s the tutorial:
*Note: click the 
button in the lower-right of the player for a fullscreen hi-res version.
Setup is a fairly intuitive process with a few caveats to watch for. Namely these are:
- If you’re hosting multiple JumpBoxes on the same machine you’ll have a list of disk images that all share the same name. The only way to tell which one to use when attaching disks to the VM is by hovering over the dropdown and looking at the path that appears in the tooltip.
- Make sure you add the disks before you start configuring the VM. The last step of configuration is to attach the disks and it presumes you’ve already added them via the Media Manager.
- If you’re on an Intel Mac you’ll want to enable the VTX instructions for faster performance. Failing to do so will mean it runs about 8x slower than it should.
- If you want to run it in bridged ethernet mode you have to remember to explicitly tell it the network interface to use (Parallels and Fusion silently do this for you behind the scenes).
- You need to remember to add all the hard disks. Typically JumpBoxes use two- root.vmdk and data.vmdk though some like Knowledge Tree will use three disks. All must be added.
- Most apps will require only 256MB of RAM so it’s generally a good idea to pick this setting as the default. Some of the Java-based application JumpBoxes (typically the bigger filesize ones) will require 528 or even 1GB of RAM. You can always change this setting after the fact so picking 256 to start is generally the preferred approach.
I tried this with the Movable Type JumpBox. Everything seemed to install and start up OK, but I couldn’t connect to the IP address using my browser. Sigh.
Well, after some tinkering, I found that by changing the network adapter, I was able to connect. Thanks for providing these instructions.
[...] Ramp Up screencast How to run a JumpBox on VirtualBox [...]
I had a successful install only to have a bad password or user name keep me from being able to login. Tried the work around for that and was not successful. Installed again and now have a bad URL. Should I try again?
Same problem for me… unable to process my first login as administrator to configure it… any idea? Thanks!
V.
Folks looking for help with their JumpBoxes should ask in the JumpBox Forums at http://www.jumpbox.com/forums/
Most login problems come from using the wrong username. A majority of the JumpBoxes use the name ‘admin’ and the password specified during configuration. However, a few applications don’t use the ‘admin’ username. The welcome screen presented immediately after setup tells you what username to use when logging in. This is always available at http://JUMPBOXIP/jb/welcome.html
Austin
Isn’t there any tutorial like this that is not a video. People like me in developing countries with poor internet connections that take days to download the jumpbox, have next to no chance at seeing streaming video. At least make the video downloadable. Anyone else in the same situation as me, check out ClipNabber.com.
WOW!! After flourndering around the other tutorials for Jumpbox and Virtual Box, I’ve done it - so easy with the video tutorial. Thanks a lot