JunosV Firefly Perimeter in VirtualBox and Serial Ports

August 14, 2014 Francis Luong

Today I learned:

OVA files are zip files that contain OVFs, VMDKs, and Manifests
You can unpack the JunosV Firefly OVA using unzip.
Edit the OVF to make it compatible with VirtualBox. Look for the string %iid% and replace it with a hard sequence number (for my file it was after 1 and before 3 so I used ‘2’.)
Then you need to calculate a new SHA1 sum for the OVF and replace the sum in the manifest (.mf) file.

Modify Virtual Box to add a serial port
make it for COM1/IRQ4/0x3F8
- But change Port Mode to 'Host Pipe’
- Check “Create Pipe”,
- and set a filename in the tmp folder such as /tmp/pipe
To get networking to work, use “Paravirtualized network adapter (virtio-net)” adapters. I was able to get this to work with host-only networking. Additional steps may be required to increase multicast TTL on the host config if you want it to work with Virtualbox NAT networking.
install socat if you don’t already have it (using homebrew).
- brew install socat
then use it to associate the host pipe with a PTY
- socat -d -d /tmp/pipe PTY
the logs will include the /dev/ttySXXX path…
- 2014/08/14 19:40:07 socat[96334] N PTY is /dev/ttys006
note the /dev/ttySXXX in the output and use screen to connect.