Question

I have been trying to set-up an Ajax Push Engine (APE) Server in a virtual machine, and have run into a bit of a snag. The problem is that the APE server cannot be accessed outside of the virtual machine.

Setup:

• Guest OS: Ubuntu 10.10 (I believe) with the ape package installed
  • IP Address: 192.168.56.1 using a host-only network adapter
  • APE Server running on port 6969

If I try wget 127.0.0.1:6969 in the virtual machine, I get a response.

If I try wget 192.168.56.1:6969 from the host OS, I get a Connection Refused message.

If I ping 192.168.56.1, I also get a response.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I ended up redoing everything from scratch, and it worked, so I must have got it right somehow. For the benefit of others…

To get APE Server running in a virtual machine (in particular, using VirtualBox), you need to do the following:

Setting up the environment

• Download and install VirtualBox
• Open VirtualBox, and go to File > Preferences, then Network
  • Confirm that there exists a host-only network vboxnet0 (if not, create it). Take note of its IPv4 address (192.168.56.1, in my case)
• Create a new Ubuntu Virtual Machine
• Start the Virtual Machine

Getting the Libraries

• Add the PPA for libmysqlclient15off, a pre-requisite for APE Server:

  username# gpg --keyserver  hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 1C4CBDCDCD2EFD2A
  username# gpg -a --export CD2EFD2A | apt-key add -
  sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://repo.percona.com/apt maverick main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/percona.list'
  

• Install libmysqlclient15off

  sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15off
  

• Get and install the latest version of APE server

• Edit /etc/network/interfaces, and add the following to the end:

  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet static
      address 192.168.56.101
      netmask 255.255.255.0
  

• Close the virtual machine and go into its settings. Change the network settings for the first interface to Host-only Adapter

Setting Up APE

• Restart the Virtual Machine, and ensure that the APE daemon is running

  username# ps -ef | grep "aped"
  

• If you need to, make changes to /etc/ape/ape.conf

Final Steps

• Add the following to your hosts file, or some variation:

  192.168.56.101            local.site.com
  192.168.56.101            0.local.site.com
  192.168.56.101            1.local.site.com
  192.168.56.101            2.local.site.com
  192.168.56.101            3.local.site.com
  192.168.56.101            4.local.site.com
  192.168.56.101            5.local.site.com
  192.168.56.101            6.local.site.com
  192.168.56.101            7.local.site.com
  192.168.56.101            8.local.site.com
  192.168.56.101            9.local.site.com
  

• Access your new APE server via local.site.com:6969