Run custom box using mech about mech

[espoelstra]

Looks like this project is currently lacking any unit or integration tests which makes trying to troubleshoot a game of cat and mouse and quite likely to lead to unintended side effects if any changes are made to how things work. I was really excited about having a Python alternative to Vagrant that doesn't cost a bunch of money, but not having any tests makes it very hard to recommend or even to try to contribute because I'll have no idea what I'm breaking when I try to fix things.

[Kronuz]

I haven’t tried this too much, but I think you need to give it the name as well (during init). Create a new directory and inside it do:

mech init windows_2008_r2 /some/path/to/windows_2008_r2_vmware

Please let me know if this works.

[dynomite567]

Hi, I have attempted this. I can say that this does not work, even with the --name option.

Simply put, the same output occurs:

$ mech init --name=metasploitable3-ub1404 /path/to/the/metasploitable3-ub1404-vmware.box
Initializing mech
A Mechfile has been initialized and placed in this directory. You
are now ready to mech up your first virtual environment!

$ mech up
Provided box name is not valid
Loading metadata for box 'metasploitable3-ub1404-vmware'
Bad response from HashiCorp's Vagrant Cloud API: 404 Client Error: Not Found for url: https://app.vagrantup.com/metasploitable3-ub1404-vmware/boxes/boxes

And for without the --name option,

$ mech init metasploitable3-ub1404 ~/mech/metasploitable3-ub1404-vmware.box
Initializing mech
A Mechfile has been initialized and placed in this directory. You
are now ready to mech up your first virtual environment!

$ mech up
Provided box name is not valid
Loading metadata for box 'metasploitable3-ub1404'
Bad response from HashiCorp's Vagrant Cloud API: 404 Client Error: Not Found for url: https://app.vagrantup.com/metasploitable3-ub1404/boxes/boxes

Here is the generated Mechfile (ran without --name):

$ cat Mechfile
{
  "box": "metasploitable3-ub1404",
  "file": "/path/to/the/metasploitable3-ub1404-vmware.box",
  "name": null
}

[espoelstra]

You should use mech box add NAME PATH before attempting to mech init NAME. They have done a great job of keeping the CLI interface very similar to Vagrant for most operations.

See https://github.com/mechboxes/mech/blob/master/mech/mech.py#L206 for syntax or use mech box --help to see the options.

[espoelstra]

It appears there is an issue with the tar syntax on Ubuntu 18.04, mech tries to use *.vmx but without --wildcards it gets interpreted as a filename and fails.

mech box add eval-win10 /projects/github/boxcutter-windows/box/vmware/eval-win10x64-enterprise-nocm-1.0.4.box
Checking box 'eval-win10' integrity...
tar: Pattern matching characters used in file names
tar: Use --wildcards to enable pattern matching, or --no-wildcards to suppress this warning
tar: *.vmx: Not found in archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

But a vmx file IS there.

tar --list -f /projects/github/boxcutter-windows/box/vmware/eval-win10x64-enterprise-nocm-1.0.4.box
Vagrantfile
disk-s001.vmdk
disk-s002.vmdk
disk-s003.vmdk
disk-s004.vmdk
disk-s005.vmdk
disk-s006.vmdk
disk-s007.vmdk
disk-s008.vmdk
disk-s009.vmdk
disk-s010.vmdk
disk-s011.vmdk
disk.vmdk
eval-win10x64-enterprise.nvram
eval-win10x64-enterprise.vmsd
eval-win10x64-enterprise.vmx
eval-win10x64-enterprise.vmxf
metadata.json

[espoelstra]

It looks like this should be working from a glance at this function, but I haven't fully stepped through it yet. https://github.com/mechboxes/mech/blob/master/mech/utils.py#L324

[espoelstra]

OK, it looks like the \b--wildcards\b isn't matching properly in the tar --help subprocess output, though removing the \b bits seems to have fixed it in my case and I was able to get the box properly added.

This was under Python 3.6.8 on Ubuntu 18.04 (using Pyenv to manage versions but that shouldn't matter in this case).

[espoelstra]

Urrggggh, got the box added, but had to supply a path to the box again when doing mech init instead of just mech init JUST_ADDED_BOX_NAME so it was mech init NAME PATH, though I used the ~/.mech/boxes/NAME/FILENAME.box as the PATH, but it still won't let me mech up even though it successfully creates a Mechfile in the directory.

[espoelstra]

So it looks like the trouble is related to local mech box add NOT properly going through the extraction of the VMX file and other bits to the ~/.mech/boxes/BOXNAME/ path so when trying to bring it up by name it doesn't have a VMX to reference and match against. If I find some more time I'll take a look deeper, but for now I'm off to manually start some VMs with vmrun.

[network-shark]

@espoelstra Do you have a pull request for this issue . I would try it :) . It seems that there is an issue with some freebsd images . I can't import them . Than I started to build my own box , but now I can't add it .... .