add troubleshooting tips from Fall 2015 D-Lab intensives

[aculich]

Creating this issue to track all reports of issues so we can document the troubleshooting tips page.

I've labeled this item as "help wanted" since we'd welcome anyone to help contribute to the documentation and send a pull request (or if you think you want to contribute to the documentation directly you can request to become a bce-helper to commit directly to the docs repo).

[aculich]

@davclark wrote:

VBox 5.0 apparently doesn't work. 4.3.28 is working.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 2:21 PM
Subject: [BCE] Problem with BCE on new mac laptops
To: Berkeley Common Environment ucb-bce@googlegroups.com
Cc: davclark@berkeley.com

Bummer - looks like new macs are not working well with VBox. I'm going to explore a later version of VirtualBox. (this is actually Dav)

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine BCE-2015-summer.

Failed to load VMMR0.r0 (VERR_VMM_SMAP_BUT_AC_CLEAR).

Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: ConsoleWrap
Interface: IConsole {872da645-4a9b-1727-bee2-5585105b9eed}

[aculich]

@deniederhut wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dillon Niederhut dillon.niederhut@berkeley.edu
Date: Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:41 PM
Subject: Re: Info requested on common BCE issues
To: "Ronald L. Sprouse" ronald@berkeley.edu, Aaron Culich aculich@berkeley.edu
Cc: Chris Paciorek paciorek@stat.berkeley.edu, "bce@lists.berkeley.edu" bce@lists.berkeley.edu

Hey everyone,

I'm reporting in from a day of BCE installs - no issues to be resolved, just an FYI.

We had some issues with Windows users where the OS would fail to load because the host machine didn't support 64 bit CPUs. I'm not sure what that means, as the Xubuntu image is 32 bit, but the error message also included something about hardware acceleration.

Also, and this is just an FYI, the most recent version of VirtualBox (5.0.2) doesn't work on the new Macbooks (as in it refuses to load the imported image). We found that v4.3.28 would load BCE, but the folder sharing was a bit wonky and caused one machine to crash.

Hope this is helpful.

Yours,
Dillon

[aculich]

@ryanlovett wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ryan Lovett rylo@berkeley.edu
Date: Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 6:11 PM
Subject: Re: Info requested on common BCE issues
To: Dillon Niederhut dillon.niederhut@berkeley.edu
Cc: "bce@lists.berkeley.edu" bce@lists.berkeley.edu

Thanks Dillon! Most recent versions of BCE are 64-bit. Do you recall what sort of computers they were? Some netbooks running Intel Atom CPUs are 32-bit and computers older than, say, 7 years or so are 32-bit.

I think we need to alter the install docs to more strongly emphasize the BCE/VirtualBox version pairing, especially now with VirtualBox 5 being out.

Unless there are problems, Fall 2015 will be built with, and suggest installation on, VirtualBox 5.0.x.

[aculich]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dillon Niederhut dillon.niederhut@berkeley.edu
Date: Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 8:32 PM
Subject: Re: Info requested on common BCE issues
To: Ryan Lovett rylo@berkeley.edu
Cc: "bce@lists.berkeley.edu" bce@lists.berkeley.edu

Hm... when I checked the OS info in virtualbox, it said 32bit Linux.

One of the students sent a screenshot of the new Mac + virtualbox 5 error. I've attached it here in case it is any help.

[callahad]

For the above issue ("Failed to load VMMR0.r0 (VERR_VMM_SMAP_BUT_AC_CLEAR)."), see VirtualBox ticket 14412. At the moment, it looks like the workaround is to use a test build from virtualbox.org/wiki/Testbuilds.

Once 5.0.3 is released, this should be resolved.