Vagrant / Virtualbox, shared folder out of sync when there are many file-related operation

vagrantvirtualbox

This is not about vagrant or virtualbox guest running slowly due to slow shared folder access, we know that can be resolved more or less by enabling nfs.

It's rather about mounted shared folder go out of sync when there are many file operations within the vm (enable nfs does not prevent it from happening) .

For example, when we are installing packages, like with php composer or node.js npm inside the vm, there is a certain probability that normal composer update or npm install will fail, and once it failed, only vagrant reload will help to restore the sync folder and allow the same command to pass without problem.

Such random failure only happens when executing on shared folder (nfs or not), so apt-get upgrade won't trigger the same problem as it runs within the vm folders.

Since the same sync problem does not appear when we run composer or npm from the host server, I am wondering what could have caused it and how do we go about debugging it?

Our vagrant setup and config:

if Vagrant::Util::Platform.windows?
    config.vm.synced_folder "www", "/var/www", :extra => "dmode=777,fmode=777", :owner => "vagrant", :group => "vagrant"
else
    config.vm.synced_folder "www", "/var/www", :extra => "dmode=777,fmode=777", :nfs => true
end

Guest: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64

Host: Windows 8, Mac OSX 10.8, Ubuntu 13 (yes, they all run into the same problem randomly)

Best Answer

Think we have more or less discover the source of problem:

Guest Addition version (4.1.x) that comes with our Ubuntu 12 LTS box does not match current Virtualbox version (4.2.x) installed on host machine. So file sync failed.

The easy fix:

  1. run this command within vm sudo apt-get -y -q purge virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11 to remove old guest addition

  2. install vagrant vbguest plugin so future update is taken care of automatically during up: https://github.com/dotless-de/vagrant-vbguest

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