Do most users struggle to make this lab actually work? Is Vagrant just very unstable in general?

[jt0dd]

This problem doesn't seem to be isolated to this project; We tried launching every lab we could find and ran into error after error after error.

We aren't making issues for these because many of them seem to exist as previously closed issues. It's hard to even list them here, because we would then attempt fixes others mentioned, either in the issues on this repo or on Vagrant's repo issues, or on Super User / Stack Exchange and it never felt like one problem we could point at, it was always 3 or 4 with every project, with information about the problems online. But eventually after 4 or 5 problems building the lab, we got exhausted and moved on to the next lab, and the next, thinking eventually one would "just work". None of them worked.

They all use Vagrant, so I suspect that's the root issue.

When I say "we", I mean myself and a colleague trying on two separate Windows 11 machines, so it doesn't seem to be just user error or one oddball PC.

I realize I'm not giving any useful info; this isn't a bug report - just more of a question about whether we had a unique experience or this is par for the course. We already "solved" our problem by building a lab manually.

[clong]

Hi @jt0dd

Looking at the big picture here, building a lab consists of a massive number of dependencies, many of which are not pinned to specific versions. On top of that you have multiple providers (VMware, Virtualbox, etc), multiple versions of those providers, multiple operating systems and people with all sorts of unique system and network configurations.

If you review the CI pipeline results for the DetectionLab weekly build, you’ll see that it’s reasonably stable, but that’s only testing a single version of a single provider on a single operating system.

This is a long way of saying “this is an extremely complex project that is supported primarily by one person in their free time, which is becoming increasingly limited”

Hope this helps you understand why this project, and even Vagrant are really tricky to support for everyone.

By all means, submit as many issues as you want - that’s what they’re there for. If they’re marked closed, I often will re-open them if people are still having issues.

[jt0dd]

@clong I don't mean to cast the project in a negative light or imply more should be expected of you or the maintainers of any open source project. Just trying to gain a little insight into the friction involved.

[clong]

@jt0dd no worries - I didn’t take it that way! It’s just that one element is that it’s a single person maintaining it, as opposed to an entire company. I noticed you commented on a few issues, so thank you!