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> I don't trust security people to do sane things Seriously. Security decisions that demolish UX can tank entire products. Recent-ish example: Oracle VirtualB
by umvi 7y ago
> I don't trust security people to do sane things
Seriously. Security decisions that demolish UX can tank entire products.
Recent-ish example: Oracle VirtualBox. Used to love that software and I would recommend it to friends needing VMs. They added a new hardening feature that makes it unusable on my setup for whatever reason (VMs fail to start with "hardening failures"). There is no option to disable the hardening feature short of going into the source code figuring out how to disable it and building from scratch[1]. It's like geez, I don't even care about hardening - I'm not trying to analyze stuxnet or some ransomware virus here, I just want to work on my web app in between classes at school on my windows laptop.
There's a massive FAQ on the VirtualBox forums on how to debug hardening failures[2]. I spent about 5 hours working through the FAQ and troubleshooting before I just said "screw this" and bought VMWare which worked perfectly first try. I no longer recommend VirtualBox to friends - I tell them it will likely give them headaches and to use VMWare or WSL instead.
[1] https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=84523 https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=84523
[2] https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=82106 https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=82106
[3] https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=62897 https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=62897
Note: [3] is actually pretty entertaining thread with insane security people defending the new terrible hardening issues of VirtualBox.
- sekh60 7y agoJust curious if you have considered migrating from VirtualBox to Hyper-V given you are doing your work on a Windows laptop.
- umvi 7y agoNo, actually I had somehow never heard of Hyper-V before today (or maybe I had but for some reason it didn't click it was software I could make VMs with). Great suggestion, I'll look into it.
- hermitdev 7y agoDefinitely give Hyper-V a shot. I've been using it at home and work since Windows 8. I had a lot of issues with VirtualBox and networking (I could never SSH into a VM from the host working, for example). In Hyper-V, all you need to do is setup a virtual switch and the host and VM can talk to each other just fine. Hyper-V just works. I've got Linux and Windows VMs and have never had a problem with either (as far as virtualization goes). I use it less frequently now that Win10 has WSL & WSL 2, though (although WSL 2 uses a lightweight VM on Hyper-V).
- Avery3R 7y agoOne of the only downsides is that hyper v doesn't support usb pass through. However if you had you, you could install a pcie USB card then pass that through
- youdontknowtho 7y agoFYI, enable hyper-v and you don't need Vbox.
- hcarvalhoalves 7y agoThe funny thing is, VirtualBox is the “best” product in principle, it’s adopting security by default and has one more feature on the bullet point list. Analyzed in isolation everybody would agree that’s good, yet the overall value for the user, considering all the use cases, is lesser, because the definition of “better” was “more restrictive”.