I wanted to add some room booking assistants to our conference rooms. My last place used evoko units – which worked quite well – but they required 1) PoE ethernet drops and 2) $1100 each.

So after reading about Joan I decided to get one to try out. They offer both SaaS and on-prem hosting options; I opted for the on-prem because it is free and I haven’t setup a linux server in a while.

They don’t have installation steps for the software running on the host, but they do offer an OVF just for our needs (currently running VMWare 6.7 with VCenter). Great!

Followed along with (https://support.getjoan.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003534485-On-premises-hosting) the getjoan install site. Downloaded the OVF tgz file.
Already I was a bit upset – why is this compressed with tgz? I should note there is no space savings realized by performing these actions; we’re still at just over 2GB for the entire file, but now I have 3 copies of it..
Uncompressed it and now it’s a .tar file. Inside the .tar is the OVF and VMDK files I need, so I simply renamed this .tar to .ova and went about importing into VMWare.

Selected my files for import and during validation it FAILED!
Issues detected with selected template. Details: – 60:7:VALUE_ILLEGAL: Value ”lsilogic” of ResourceSubType element not found in []. – 69:7:VALUE_ILLEGAL: Value ”lsilogic” of ResourceSubType element not found in []. – 78:7:VALUE_ILLEGAL: Value ”3” of Parent element does not refer to a ref of type DiskControllerReference.

Super helpful. So I untar’d the file to be able to edit the .ovf manifest in my favorite text editor. I changed it from lsilogic to lsilogicsas and re-ran. Received a different error, but still no dice. Some google searches later led me to attempt to bypass vsphere completely and import directly onto one of my hosts.

http://host/ui and a login later, I had the OVA imported successfully! Yay!

Booted it up and it has the virtualbox tools already installed. This delays the startup of the machine while it waits:
“A start job is running for the raise network”
Five. Minutes. Later.

I’m on VMware, so this virtualbox bridged network won’t ever work!

Well, let’s install vmtools so that I can at least stop using the console and SSH in like a normal person: Failed!

Need to add the cdrom drive to the machine, but I can’t do that while it’s running. Stop the machine, add the CDROM drive, and start it back up.

Another. Five. Minutes. FML!

Fix the waiting game for Networking:
sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/networking.service.d/
sudo bash -c 'echo -e "[Service]\nTimeoutStartSec=20sec" > /etc/systemd/system/networking.service.d/timeout.conf'
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Stop virtualbox from starting up and failing:
sudo systemctl disable vboxadd.service

Now to install vmware’s tools:
Using vcenter, select to install vmware tools on the running vm
Then, using command line:
sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom
sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
tar xzvf /mnt/cdrom/VMWareTools-* -C /tmp
cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
Follow along with the wizard to install
Reboot

I’ll potentially update this when/if I actually get into the configuration of Joan.