Installing VirtualBox on Ubuntu Server LTS

I decided to install VirtualBox on Ubuntu server so I can use it later with Cuckoo Sandbox for malware analysis.

The steps followed for this installation are:

• Download and installation of Ubuntu Server LTS (current version 12.04.1)
• VirtualBox and dependencies installation (current stable version 4.1.12)
• Phpvirtualbox installation for headless servers (version 4.1-11)
• VirtualBox extension pack installation for VRDP support
• Starting VirtualBox and connecting to Phpvirtualbox web user interface

1.- Download and installation of Ubuntu Server LTS

I decided to use Ubuntu Server LTS as it is stable and does not require the installation of a Desktop environment, which I won't use for my purposes. The server used has a 64 bits CPU, 12GB RAM, and 514GB of hard disk space, what is more than enough to run several virtual machines in parallel.

A fresh Ubuntu Server image can be downloaded from: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server

Then you can choose to run the ISO from a USB stick or CD-ROM drive. My recommendation is to install only the base system, so we keep the server clean from packages that we won't use. The only extra package I installed was the SSH server so I can access it remotely.

Once finished the installation processes lets also upgrade the Debian packages to the latest version by
running these commands:

 $ apt-get update  
 $ apt-get dist-upgrade  

As well I setup the hostname and network settings at /etc/hostname and /etc/network/interfaces.

2.- VirtualBox and dependencies installation

Installing Virtualbox with apt-get:

 $ apt-get install virtualbox  

Checking installed packages:

 $ dpkg -l | grep -i virtualbox  
 ii virtualbox             4.1.12-dfsg-2ubuntu0.2    x86 virtualization solution - base binaries  
 ii virtualbox-dkms          4.1.12-dfsg-2ubuntu0.2    x86 virtualization solution - kernel module sources for dkms  
 ii virtualbox-qt           4.1.12-dfsg-2ubuntu0.2    x86 virtualization solution - Qt based user interface  

3.- Installing Phpvirtualbox

First we need to install apache2 and php:

 $ apt-get install apache2  
 $ apt-get install php5  

Then we can install Phpvirtualbox, setting the permissions of the directory to your own username (mine is santiago):

 $ cd /var/www/  
 $ wget http://phpvirtualbox.googlecode.com/files/phpvirtualbox-4.1-11.zip  
 $ unzip phpvirtualbox-4.1-11.zip  
 $ chown -R santiago:santiago /var/www/phpvirtualbox/  
 $ cp /var/www/phpvirtualbox/config.php-example /var/www/phpvirtualbox/config.php  

Then edit /var/www/phpvirtualbox/config.php and set the username and password for the system user that runs VirtualBox:

 var $username = 'santiago';  
 var $password = 'yourpassword';  

4.- VirtualBox extension pack installation for VRDP support

Installing the extension pack will allow us to control the virtual machines desktop remotely.

 wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.1.12/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.1.12.vbox-extpack  
 vboxmanage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.1.12.vbox-extpack  

5.- Starting VirtualBox and connecting to Phpvirtualbox user interface

The following command is used to start VirtualBox web services

 $ vboxwebsrv -b  

Then we can connect to the user interface from our browser at http://yourserverip/phpvirtualbox
user: admin
password: admin

We should be know able to use our fresh installation of VirtualBox.

References

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/
http://codesupply.net/content/setup-ubuntu-1110-64bit-server-headless-virtualbox-host