"Henuka Daluwatta" [email protected] wrote:

• a Qcow2 file extracted from the CITS3007 vagrant image

I've tried doing numerous times this but had no success. It's a shame as I have successfully done this extraction before, though it has always been a hit-or-miss.

Going into ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/arranstewart-VAGRANTSLASH-cits3007-ubuntu2004/0.1.4/virtualbox and using ls reveals a packer-cits3007-1659682974-disk001.vmdk.

I used scp to copy it over to an AMD64 virtual machine for Kali Linux and tried to use qemu-img with the command: qemu-img convert -O qcow2 packer-cits3007-1659682974-disk001.vmdk cits3007.qcow2

Putting this into UTM and disabling UEFI boot in the system settings for the VM in UTM didn't do anything. 😭

Thanks for letting me know. Just to clarify: the lab worksheet "Using UTM on M-series Mac laptops" suggests a different process to the one you seem to have used. You've extracted a .vmdk file from your ~/.vagrant.d directory, then used qemu-img to convert it to Qcow2 format. But a Qcow2 disk for the CITS3007 SDE already exists, and can be obtained by following the lab worksheet instructions. (The "Vagrant hub" can store images for multiple providers – if you look at the entry for the CITS3007 Vagrant image here, you'll see that entries are listed for both VMware and Libvirt, and Libvirt is the underlying library used by UTM.)

Since I don't have a Mac, I'm afraid I can't reproduce your issue, but you might try using the Qcow2 file suggested by the lab worksheet. Usually, conversion between VMDK and Qcow2 is fairly lossless, but virtual machines are complex and it wouldn't hurt to try the original file.

If any other students have successfully used a Qcow2 file on a Mac laptop, do feel free to post here and explain what you did. Failing that, I'd suggest just using the ARM64 Ubuntu 22.04 image, as suggested by the lab sheet.

(You could also try importing a smaller and simpler x86-64 image, and see if that works – if you look at the Vagrant hub page here, then under "libvirt" you should be able to find VM images of only 300MB in size for Alpine Linux. If those work, but the CITS3007 image doesn't, then that might help me pinpoint exactly what the problem is.)

Cheers,

Arran

p.s. The qemu tools should be obtainable on a Mac just by running brew install qemu (see here), if you use Brew. I don't think there's any need to copy files back and forth from Kali Linux.