Windows 7 build failures

[obilodeau]

Right now I'm experiencing repeated failures to build Windows 7 in both 32 and 64 bit formats. It seems to be caused by packer, I'm still testing. It hangs when cleaning up plugins. No problem on Windows 10.

Jenkins packer is 1.3.1.

Desktop packer worked fine, version 1.0.3.

[obilodeau]

Different build failure: hang after a powershell failure caused by chocolatey failure (404 see #107) still on Windows 7. Stalled for 15 minutes. Retrying a build.

[obilodeau]

Tried packer 1.2.5 and it failed. To make sure I built a Windows 10 64-bit with it and it worked under 35 minutes.

Trying 1.0.3 on the Jenkins server now.

[obilodeau]

Same problem with 1.0.3 which worked on my desktop. I'm going to need to forward ports and access the Windows system in order to see what's going on.

[obilodeau]

Ok, after a ton of attempts I think it could be related to Windows refusing to accept a forced network selection because it detects a public and/or a non-expected public IP. I've seen this before.

[obilodeau]

Last Friday I was able to confirm that the network location dialog doesn't cause an issue for WinRM access. I upgraded to VirtualBox 5.2.x today. I needed to alter the test/smoke/Dockerfile setup to align the host and the container versions. After a few hours, I successfully built a box using malboxes directly on the host.

When I tried to build from within Jenkins CI system it hang in the powershell just like it used to do when I opened that ticket. This is in opposition to what I experienced when I downgraded packer (where VirtualBox would be still running and hung).

Because of that, I cherry-picked a packer downgrade patch and I'm retrying a build with a new virtualbox and a downgraded packer version.

[obilodeau]

Downgrading packer again to 1.0.3 (latest of 1.0.x) since 1.0.2 worked on the host. I also removed the .cache/malboxes directory.

[obilodeau]

VRDP doesn't work, its not even started. I think Oracle's VirtualBox requires VirtualBox Proprietary extensions to be installed. Tried installing them, I see the VRDP listener running in the container now. I still can't connect to them but this seems related to a docker mistake...

[obilodeau]

Also saw this interesting log entry in VirtualBox\ VMs/packer-virtualbox-iso-1539186259/Logs/VBox.log . The timing is especially interesting.

00:17:44.785558 VMMDev: Guest requests the VM to be turned off

It's like its Windows that is requesting the shutdown. I need to look at the screen.

[obilodeau]

Using docker's host networking I was able to access the VRDP server and view the VM's content. It turns out that the whole install proceeds smoothly but at some point packer stops gathering the logs. The VM finishes its setup and I don't know why this would be Windows 7 specific though...

I looked at issues about Jenkins hanging and didn't found anything revealing. I tried to streamline the build: removed package installs and removed debug logging. It worked! I built a Windows 7 64-bit. Now cleaning up the various tests so I can do a proper PR.

[obilodeau]

Successfully built all platforms a few hours ago with the ci-windows7-fixes branch!