[Freedombox-discuss] Test if your freedombox is working as it should (testsuite)

[A. F. Cano]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 07:08:28AM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> ...
> > I can login as root and fbx, but I suspect this is not normal
> > behavior.  How do I access plinth?
> 
> You can access it by visiting <URL: http://10.0.2.15/plinth/ > with
> your browser. :)

NOTE: I've left some of the dead-end excursions I went through in
trying to debug this to show the likely paths someone trying to set 
up a virtualbox freedombox might encounter.  Hopefully it will help
to give enough detail for the eventual documentation.

Now, about the problems:

I suppose I should have asked: How do I access plinth when the fbx is
running in a virtualbox?

Obviously, I need to know the interface names on which the virtualbox
is listening.  The default eth0 is in NAT mode, so it can't be accessed
from outside the virtualbox.  It only passes back packets from
connections originated from inside the virtualbox, and it is connected
directly to the physical board of the native machine/OS.  That's why ping
and nslookup from inside the virtualbox work.

So, next I went looking at the virtualbox documentation:

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html

It appears that what I need is to create a "Host-only" second interface.
>From the Settings > Network > Adapter 2 panel, selected Host-only
adapter but then the Name dropdown menu only has the entry "Not
Selected" and there's no way to change it.  There's another step that
needs to be taken before that: File > Preferences > Network > Host-only
Networks (tab) and then Add.  The Host-only network is then added:
vboxnet0.  Then, from Machine > settings > Network > Adapter 2 (tab)
the vboxnet0 name appears.

After starting the fbx, this appears in the routing table of the
physical machine:

192.168.56.0	*	255.255.255.0	U   0   0   0 vboxnet0

But I can't ping it.  Pointing konqueror (configured for no proxy
and pointed to http://192.168.56.0/plinth) says connection refused -
network unreachable.

Had to go back to the File > Preferences > Network > Host-only Networks
(tab) and then click on the Edit icon, then I was able to change the
ipv4 address to 10.0.2.15.

After that, konqueror does connect to the fbx (http://10.0.2.15/) and
comes back with:

Index of /
Name Last modified Size Description

but nothing happens when any of those links get clicked on.

http://10.0.2.15/plinth/ says

Not Found.
The requested URL /plinth/ was not found on this server.

It looks like some redirection is not working.  There is only
html/index.html in /var/www.

>From earlier research:

Inside the fbx, eth1 is detected.  From dmesg:

eth1: (PCI:33MHz:32-bit) 08:00:27:b2:43:c9
eth1: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection

But ifconfig doesn't report eth1.  It needs to be manually brought up:
#ifconfig eth1 up (there's no mention of eth1 in
/etc/network/interfaces).

route only knows about eth0 (in the fbx/virtualbox)
default	  10.0.2.2	0.0.0.0	UG	0	0	0	0 eth0
10.0.2.0  *		255.255.255.0	U	0	0	0 eth0

At this point, I can connect to the fbx, so it looks like the
virtualbox issues are solved.  But I still can't get plinth.

> You can use the privoxy (8118), dns (53), tor (4431/9050) and XMPP

http://10.0.2.15:8118 says connection refused.

> (5269) services on the machine out of the box, and can use plinth to
> install owncloud (which need to be configured manually after
> installation) using the web interface.
> 
> ...
> There is no user documentation yet.  If you had two interfaces, there
> is a dhcp service on eth1 setting the box up as a router.

Something is not working quite that automatically, it seems.  Or maybe
this part is working, even though eth1 doesn't show in the routing
table.  I suspect some configuration is not being done correctly when
running in virtualbox.

Has there been new code in the last few days? Is this again a case of
running an old version?

>...

Augustine