Writing Vagrantfiles is tedious, especially when you’re setting up a multi-VM environment. Typically, people will copy/paste code blocks that define hosts, but that becomes unwieldy. However, a Vagrantfile is “just” Ruby, so can’t we simplify things a bit using the power of the language? Turns out, we can! Read below to find how you can reduce setting up a multi-VM Vagrant environment to writing a simple YAML file.

One of the greatest pitfalls when working with VirtualBox VMs is a good understanding of how networking works. In this post, we’ll discuss the most important differences between them, and their limitations when you use VirtualBox to experiment with setting up network services on a VM.

In our system administration courses, we use VirtualBox to allow students to set up their own Linux machines without having to resort to dual booting. VirtualBox is certainly not the “best” virtualization platform, but it is supported on the three common desktop platforms and works similarly on all of them.

This weekend, I installed NetBeans 8.0.2 and was dismayed that it consistently) took 1' 23" to start. Here’s how I found out what went wrong. Spoiler: it’s a DNS problem.

This post was first published on Medium, but I moved it over here.