Starting Virtual Machine Returns VERR_MAIN_CONFIG_CONSTRUCTOR_COM_ERROR

[ckwoedy]

When starting the SAS University Edition virtual application, VirtualBox 5.1 returns a VERR_MAIN_CONFIG_CONSTRUCTOR_COM_ERROR error. This error did not occur on 5.0.24 and earlier. This error appears to only be effecting Windows 10 64-bit and Mac OS X so far.

​https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Analytics-U/SAS-University-Edition-Installation-Problem-COM-Port-Error/m-p/284370/highlight/false#M4032

[ckwoedy]

Windows 10 vbox log

[ckwoedy]

OSX vBox log

[stzwil]

The issue seems to be that the ovf file has an adapter without a MAC address:

<Adapter slot="0" type="82540EM" enabled="true" cable="true">

This worked in previous releases of VirtualBox just fine. In this version however, it does not.

According to the docs, if the MACAddress is null or empty, it will generate a unique MAC address:

https://www.virtualbox.org/sdkref/interface_i_network_adapter.html#a5c4f1d58ebd782183dbe2d5ff21aab5e

However, even when I tried modifying the adapter line to include MACAddress="", it failed.

[Frank Mehnert]

Right, that's a bug. How was the OVF file created? With VirtualBox or some other application?

[stzwil]

The OVF was created using this code:

​https://github.com/sassoftware/jobslave/blob/404d38a2cb865fab6790a0504a199199f630de89/jobslave/generators/ovf_image.py#L385

If the OVF is incorrect please let me know.

FWIW, I think this was broken in SVN r61009:

​https://github.com/mdaniel/virtualbox-org-svn-vbox-trunk/commit/ce8fcb41058d4f38a96b9691d8a2dbe51772eefb

but I'm guessing you already knew that and since this was a major cleanup/rewrite of config parsing, it is also probably not something that would be reverted.

I've posted the entire OVF file here:

​https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f2f7da7638b7cf81a47a127d64662844

This OVF works well in version 5.0 and earlier.

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Interesting approach for creating the OVF file, but I don't see an issue with that. By including the XML config specifically for VirtualBox you get more precise VM creation results. It should be possible to create a reasonably similar config with a 'usual' OVF file. If not we'd like to know what issue you're running into.

The 5.1.2 maintenance release will have a fix for the issue with the missing MAC address generation.

[stzwil]

That's great, thanks so much. Can you tell me a rough idea when that might be out? Should I expect days, weeks or months? :)

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Neither.

[Frank Mehnert]

Fixed in 5.1.2.