Today I learned… well… it is complicated. For some reason I really struggled getting a server set up to use as a CI box for running test kitchen tests. Today I finally discovered why I was having so much trouble. I do not understand the reason for this, but I will share my findings nonetheless.

I had a host server running Ubuntu 14.04 and my test kitchen box was also Ubuntu 14.04.

I ran essentially the equivalent of the following commands to get the host box set up:

apt-get install vagrant virtualbox virtualbox-dkms
wget http://opscode-omnibus-packages.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/12.04/x86_64/chefdk_0.3.0-1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i chefdk_0.3.0-1_amd64.deb

That installed vagrant, virtualbox and test kitchen. My problem was that when I would try to run kitchen or even just a very simple vagrant up I would not be able to connect to the newly spun up virtualbox machine. Taking test kitchen out of the picture just vanilla vagrant with virtualbox installed fresh on a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 seems like it should just work, but it just would not.

I’m sure there is a reason that makes sense to someone, but I discovered that using 32 bit vagrant boxes would work whereas 64 bit vagrant boxes would not. That sort of provided a work around for me, for the time being at least.