Month: August 2025

Oracle VirtualBox 7.2.0 and Vagrant 2.4.9

Oracle VirtualBox 7.2.0

Oracle has released VirtualBox 7.2.0.

The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

I’ve done an install on a Windows 10 and a Windows 11 PC and it worked fine in both cases.

Vagrant 2.4.9

There is a new new version of Vagrant available. You can download version 2.4.9 from here.

Vagrant 2.4.9 works with VirtualBox 7.2.0, so you are good to go.

Working with Vagrant and VirtualBox 7.2.0

The current version of Vagrant is 2.4.9, which supports VirtualBox 7.2. If you are working with an older version of Vagrant and can’t update it, you can still get it to work by making the following changes.

Edit the “meta.rb” file, adding in an entry for version 7.2.

Windows Path – C:\Program Files\Vagrant\embedded\gems\gems\vagrant-2.4.8\plugins\providers\virtualbox\driver\meta.rb

 driver_map = { "4.0" => Version_4_0, "4.1" => Version_4_1, "4.2" => Version_4_2, "4.3" => Version_4_3, "5.0" => Version_5_0, "5.1" => Version_5_1, "5.2" => Version_5_2, "6.0" => Version_6_0, "6.1" => Version_6_1, "7.0" => Version_7_0, "7.1" => Version_7_1, "7.2" => Version_7_2, }

Create the “version_7_2.rb” file as a copy of the existing “version_7_1.rb” file.

Edit the file and replace the following.

  • 7.1 becomes 7.2
  • 7_1 becomes 7_2

This will leave the file looking like this.

Windows path – C:\Program Files\Vagrant\embedded\gems\gems\vagrant-2.4.8\plugins\providers\virtualbox\driver\version_7_2.rb

# Copyright (c) HashiCorp, Inc. # SPDX-License-Identifier: BUSL-1.1 require File.expand_path("../version_7_0", __FILE__) module VagrantPlugins module ProviderVirtualBox module Driver # Driver for VirtualBox 7.2.x class Version_7_2 < Version_7_1 def initialize(uuid) super @logger = Log4r::Logger.new("vagrant::provider::virtualbox_7_2") end end end end end

Edit the “plugin.rb” adding in a 7.2 entry.

Windows path – C:\Program Files\Vagrant\embedded\gems\gems\vagrant-2.4.8\plugins\providers\virtualbox\plugin.rb

module Driver autoload :Meta, File.expand_path("../driver/meta", __FILE__) autoload :Version_4_0, File.expand_path("../driver/version_4_0", __FILE__) autoload :Version_4_1, File.expand_path("../driver/version_4_1", __FILE__) autoload :Version_4_2, File.expand_path("../driver/version_4_2", __FILE__) autoload :Version_4_3, File.expand_path("../driver/version_4_3", __FILE__) autoload :Version_5_0, File.expand_path("../driver/version_5_0", __FILE__) autoload :Version_5_1, File.expand_path("../driver/version_5_1", __FILE__) autoload :Version_5_2, File.expand_path("../driver/version_5_2", __FILE__) autoload :Version_6_0, File.expand_path("../driver/version_6_0", __FILE__) autoload :Version_6_1, File.expand_path("../driver/version_6_1", __FILE__) autoload :Version_7_0, File.expand_path("../driver/version_7_0", __FILE__) autoload :Version_7_1, File.expand_path("../driver/version_7_1", __FILE__) autoload :Version_7_2, File.expand_path("../driver/version_7_2", __FILE__) end

Vagrant should now work as normal.

Thoughts

I would not be surprised if we get an update for 7.2.0 really soon. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with 7.2.0, but new released are often followed up with some rapid bug fixes. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

30 years? OK, but what do you actually do?

I was recently contacted by a former colleague. We both started our first job in tech at the same company on the same day. His message started like this.

“Insane isn’t it. 30 years! Where has the time gone?”

It is insane to think it’s been that long.

The second prompt for writing this post was watching some people criticize a guy for constantly changing his job title when he was speaking to people. I feel like I’m guilty of this also. So I thought I would write a (slightly late) post for my 30 year anniversary in tech.

Qualifications

Depending on the group of people I’m speaking with I might say one of the following related to my qualifications.

  • I have a PhD in molecular and population genetics.
  • I have a PhD in molecular genetics.
  • I have a PhD in genetic engineering.
  • I have a PhD in biology.
  • I have a PhD in cabbage shagging. (this is my default answer these days)
  • I don’t have any relevant qualifications for what I do.

Basically I change the answer to suit the people I’m speaking to, and their vibe. All of them are true, but depending on how pedantic you are being, you might raise an eyebrow at some of them.

Job titles I’ve had

I looked back through an old CV, and over the years I’ve been employed with the following official job titles.

  • Programmer
  • Analyst Programmer
  • Software Project Leader
  • DBA/Analyst Programmer
  • DBA
  • DBA/Designer/Internet Developer
  • Oracle Consultant
  • DBA/Designer/Developer
  • IT Specialist
  • Lead DBA

I think most people realize the job title and what you actually do in the job don’t really have a lot in common. In every role I’ve been some sort of developer. For the last 27+ years I’ve always done DBA work. In more recent years the role of DBA has switched from “Database Administrator” to “Do Bloody Anything”.

I guess I could also throw in a few other things that have never been my full time job, but I could arguably say I’ve done.

  • Presenter
  • Author
  • Blogger
  • Trainer
  • YouTuber
  • Cat Dad

In terms of job titles, over the years I’ve had a lot of them and I identify with all of them and none of them in equal measures. 🙂

But what do you actually do?

If I’m talking to non-techies I just say I work with computers, because anything else is too difficult.

My current role is Lead DBA, but I don’t think most DBAs would recognize what I do as being a DBA job. I think it is more like a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). If I look at the what a SRE is supposed to do, I think I pretty much do that in my current job.

So when you ask what I do, you might get a variety of answers. It’s not me being evasive or trying to make myself sound special. I don’t really know what I do anymore, but there always seems to be something that needs doing. 🙂

That’s 30 years doing stuff!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I can 100% guarantee none of my family could tell you what I do!

AI will automate the jobs you probably wouldn’t have bothered to do!

One of my friends is really into using LLMs to automate office processes. He has a few different accounts, including a business ChatGPT account which he’s making heavy use of. Unlike most of the tech bros who constantly talk rubbish about AI, he’s really enthusiastic about it because he has real world uses that are making a big difference for his company. I can’t go into specifics, as it’s confidential, but I do want to speak in general terms about it.

Data Cleansing

One of the processes he’s excited about is essentially data cleansing. His company has a lot of publicly available data about products, but the quality and quantity of that data varies considerably. What’s more, the data needs additional categorization.

He’s never considered himself a “developer”, he’s a management type, but he’s actually done quite a bit of development over the years. With the assistance of ChatGPT he’s written some Python to submit source data to ChatGPT, get it to clean up the data, fill in some of the missing bits and categorize it. The cleansed data is dumped out to files where it can be checked and loaded back into the system.

He’s had this data cleansing process running overnight for a few weeks and it’s chugging through his data and doing a great job so far. Because of the nature of the task, he doesn’t have to deal with hallucinations or security issues, which is nice. His estimate is it would have taken about 10 years for his current folks to do this manually.

There are other task he’s already automated, or is in the process of automating, but I want to focus on this one.

But would you have done it manually?

We often hear about AI taking people’s jobs, but I’m not always convinced that’s true, and here’s why.

When we were talking I asked if he would have done this data cleansing manually if he didn’t have access to ChatGPT (or some other LLM) to help him. His answer was probably not. They couldn’t really commit to a 10 year project, or hire 10 times the people to make it a 1 year project, so they probably would have just made do with crappy data.

This reminds me of another automation story

This reminds me of another story. I was chatting to someone who was waxing lyrical about some automation, and how it had saved so much time for one of his teams. What he didn’t know is I had been part of that automation process, and I explained to him that the team in question never used to bother to perform this task in the past. So technically it wasn’t saving them any time. The automation had allowed them to do something that they should have always been doing, but never bothered to before. 🙂

But what about the current job cuts?

I’m not saying no jobs will be lost because of AI, the same way I’m not saying no jobs will be lost because of automation. What I am convinced of is some work will end up being done by AI and automation that would never have got done without it.

You can argue this stopped new people being employed to do the work, but I suspect those jobs would never have happened in the first place.

I rarely see people saying their company needs to do less work. What they want to do is to get more work done without hiring more people. I think that is a very different scenario.

But there are massive job cuts going on in the tech industry because of AI right? Wrong. The big players invariably say they are making these cuts because of AI, but that’s a pile of crap. In many cases they are getting rid of the people they over-hired during the pandemic or thinning out roles they “think” are no longer needed.

So why say it’s because of AI? If you shed 10,000 staff that sounds like either your business is screwed, or you were hiring stupid numbers of people for no reason in the past. Neither of these options sound good to investors. If you lay off 10,000 people and say you were able to streamline because of AI you sound supper efficient and cool. Investors love that crap.

Conclusion

I follow the AI space, and a big chunk of what is said is total rubbish. The press loves exaggerated claims and drama because it gets attention. As a result you can easily start to think the whole thing is rubbish, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

I can see uses for it, and coming back to the title of the post, I think some of them will be for automating tasks you wouldn’t otherwise have the time or money to do.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I understand I’m tossing around the term AI, when I’m not really talking about AI. Chill! 🙂

PPS. I was chatting to my friend again last night and asked how the release of ChatGPT 5 had affected his workflows. The response was, “a lot”, and not in a good way. Not having control over when these things drop is a problem.

Update: A friend messaged me, and I thought it was worth sharing as they are very important questions. See his questions, and my responses below. 🙂

Q: Has he breached Data Protection law by sharing the data with the LLM?
A: No. All the data is publicly available. Nothing private is being shared with the LLM. When I mentioned, “I can’t go into specifics, as it’s confidential”, I was referring to my conversation, not the data itself.

Q: Has he breached IP laws by sharing outputs or work generated by others both internal and external to the business?
A: No.

Q: Does his company know he is doing this and has gotten approval to share this data etc. externally?
A: He’s the boss, so yes he has approval to do this. 🙂

Oracle VirtualBox 7.1.12, Vagrant 2.4.8 and Packer 1.14.1

Oracle VirtualBox 7.1.12

VirtualBox 7.1.12 has been released. Yes, I know I am late to the party. I’ve been busy. 🙂

The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

I’ve installed it on my Windows 10 and 11 machines with no drama. My existing VMs have started and things look good.

Vagrant 2.4.8

Releases of VirtualBox prompt me to check for new versions of Vagrant. The current version is Vagrant 2.4.8. All my test systems are built with Vagrant, so I installed it as well.

If you are new to Vagrant and want to learn, you might find this useful.

Once you understand that, I found the best way of learning more was to look at builds done by other people. You can see all my Vagrant builds here.

I’ll be doing some updates to my Oracle builds over the coming days, so this will get a lot of testing.

Packer 1.14.1

I use Packer to build my Vagrant boxes (Oracle Linux 7, 8, 9, 10). You can see them here.

If you are interested in creating your own Packer builds, you might take inspiration from mine, available here.

What about Apple Silicon?

I don’t have an Apple Silicon Mac, so I can’t comment on that version. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

You don’t have to wait for 23ai for these features!

I know it’s been a long time waiting for the on-prem release of Oracle database 23ai. I feel your pain! Added to that, the previous release was 21c, which was an innovation release, so very few people would have bothered to upgrade to it.

Over time some of the functionality from 21c and 23ai has been backported into Oracle database 19c. You can get the full list here.

Standout Features

Here are some of the standouts for me. There may be others that are more important for you.

19.7

19.10

19.11

19.12

19.28

But should they have done this?

Some people say the long term release shouldn’t have new features backported to it, because it can make it less stable and more buggy. Instead Oracle should focus on making the next long term release available.

Having said that, getting to use IF [NOT] EXISTS in production is really nice. 🙂

So no, I don’t think they should do these backports, but now they are here…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. And to prove nothing is ever original, I was just told about this, which was published a couple of days ago. 🙂