Hyperbox Questions

[Robert Hayden]

I plan on trying to implement Hyperbox on a Mac with launchd. A search found several people who have stated their intent to do this, but not anyone who claimed to have succeeded. So I have a few questions about Hyperbox.

Looking at the *nix scripts I see environment variables set up that are used elsewhere in the scripts. Are any of them needed by the Java program hboxd itself? In other words, are you using System.getenv() or similar to read any of them? I can specify environment variables, but without expansion, in the launchd job definition. For anything more complex I can have launchd start a shell script which can do the prep work and then in turn start hboxd. However, if I did that I might not be able to specify "KeepAlive" in the launchd job?

Is there a facility for hboxd to automatically start VMs not already running on hboxd's start-up?  If so, can I specify a delay for each VM? (If not, I'm thinking of having a separate launchd job with a shell script to start 3 VMs, spaced out over time with "sleep". At minimum, I need one VM to be up and running before the other two start.)

Thanks!

[Max Dor]

Hi Robert,

Appologize for the delayed answer, I was unable to do so until now.

Environment variables needed for hboxd start with HBOX_ or HBOXD_. Anything else is not directly used by the various Hyperbox executables.

There are currently no facility for auto-start. We are currently not happy with the internal structure of Hyperbox and we're aiming for a rewrite while the codebase is still light, but our priorities are elsewhere for the time being.

We recommend (and use ourselves) launchd/initd/systemd scripts to handle auto-start of specific VMs, so yes do go ahead with that. Make sure you start them with the same user as hyperbox is running under!