Virtual Machine FAQ

Note

Never select “Power off the machine” when closing your VM, because this option is the equivalent of yanking the power cord on a running desktop machine. This option can result in hard drive corruption and many other problems.

When closing your VM, make sure that you always select either “Save the machine state” (this is the best option, as it will allow you to resume the VM in the exact same state you left it) or “Send the shutdown signal” (which will perform an orderly shutdown of the machine).

If you need to shut down the machine where your VM is running, make sure you close your VM before shutting down your machine. Shutting down your machine while the VM is running can have the same effect as selecting the “Power off the machine” option when closing the VM.

Why is the prompt student@cs-vm:~$:?

The VM has a single user account on it called student. CNetIDs are not recognized by the VM (they are, however, recognized by the setup script, which will access your Git repository associated with your CNetID, which is why you will see a directory called capp30121-aut-18-username in your home directory after you run the setup script).

Why am I getting an error on push/pull?

If you see any error of the form:

"ssh: Could not resolve hostname mit.cs.uchicago.edu: Name or
service not known fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the
repository exists."

the most likely cause is that your VM is not connected to the network.

Check that the machine you’re running the VM on has Internet access (you can do this just by opening a browser and going to any page). The VM relies on your machine’s Internet connection to reach the GitLab server so, if your machine doesn’t have Internet access, neither will your VM.

If your machine’s Internet access is working correctly, you should try to restart the VM’s networking. In the top right corner of your VM, there should be an icon with two arrows pointing in opposite directions:

Click on that icon. It should bring up a pull-down menu where one of the options should be “Enable Networking”. That option should have a check mark next to it. Click on it once to disable the VM’s network, and then click on “Enable Networking” again to enable it. This will restart the networking on your VM, and may solve the problem.

If you don’t see the icon with the two arrows, the window your VM is running on may be too small. Either resize the window or scroll horizontally until you can see the icon.