I was building a new version of YugabyteDB vagrant box with packer and virtual box. Because we (Yugabyte) have a new preview release out.

If you are interested in the packer scripts, you can see them in my vagrant-yugabyte repository.

If you are interested in the outcome of the packer scripts building YugabyteDB, you can see the build boxes here. A description of how to use this can be found here.

However, I was unable to build the boxes with packer for some reason. It turned out that this wasn't an easy to fix or obvious issue. In fact, I had to search quite hard to find an answer. I am pretty sure my friend Tim Hall (oracle-base) ran into this issue too. Finally, I found a description of the issue on packer GitHub: Packer 1.8.4 not working with Virtualbox 7.0.4+ #12118.

The most important thing is that there is a resolution; add:

        [
          "modifyvm",
          "{{.Name}}",
          "--nat-localhostreachable1",
          "on"
        ]

As a setting to the builders vboxmanage section.

So that is what you need to do if you find your packer (automated) RHEL builds fail with the message:

dracut-initqueue[<pid>]: curl: (28) Failed to connect to 10.0.2.2 port <port>: Connection timed out
dracut-initqueue[<pid>]: Warning: Problem : timeout. Will retry in 1 seconds. 3 tries left.

(message in the console of the VM that is build)

Virtualbox version: 7.0.4r154605
packer version: 1.8.4
OSX version: 12.6.1 (Intel)