Winrm_host setting ignored?

Packer
1

Hello everyone, first time posting here,

so I’ve been working with packer and ansible for quite some time now and would consider myself somewhat experienced.

In my latest project, I am setting up a Windows10 VM in VirtualBox with ansible and packer. Unfortunately, now I am having some problems with the WinRM communicator.

In the past, I used a NAT adapter such that WinRM could connect via IP 127.0.0.1 - and everything worked just fine.
Now I tried to switch to a Host-only adapter, which of course results in the necessity to change the IP address to connect to with WinRM (no more NAT interface - use Host-only interface). After adding the winrm_host option to the packer script with the new correct IP (“192.168.X.X”) the packer script no longer builds successfully, but gets stuck in the “Waiting for WinRM to become available”-step resulting in a timeout.
The output of the script also says “Using winrm communicator to connect: 127.0.0.1” - so it does not use the IP address I specified in the packer script.
“Manually” connecting via a small python-script using pywinrm works like a charm.

I am using packer version v1.6.6.

Has anyone else experienced this problem and found a solution? I found some older issues in the github-repository stating that the winrm_host option seems to be completely ignored.

Thanks for any input and suggestions!

EDIT: Here are the links to the above-mentioned issues:

2

Hi, just to clarify – sounds like you are not at a point where you’re even able to launch the ansible provisioner; this is a failure of the packer winrm communicator to connect, not a failure of the ansible provisioner to connect?

3

Hi. Yes, this is a failure of the packer WinRM communicator - not ansible. The failure occurs after the “basic” setup of the VM, where for other OSs the SSH connection is established next (WinRM in this case).

I am just asking in case anyone else had the same problem or maybe managed to get this to work? Basically, I just want to connect to a VM using the WinRM communicator of packer. I will try to add some basic examples to reproduce the problem. Thanks!

4

No need; I can reproduce. I think this is a bug in the virtualbox builder. I’ll add “virtualbox” to the issue in WinRm Communicator times out without winrm_host setting · Issue #6140 · hashicorp/packer · GitHub

5

What happens if you set skip_nat_mapping to true?

6

Turns out that’s not enough. Can you share the config you’re trying to get working on that linked issue? I’ll try to schedule some time to fix this.

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