Can't import OVA file or unpack it with tar

Linux@lemmy.ml – 9 points – 7 months ago

I'm on an Arch-based Linux with VirtualBox (generic installer, couldn't load modules with host-modules-arch) and I get this error whenever I try to import this OVA file:

Error reading OVA '.../coa-aio-newton.ova' (VERR_TAR_UNEXPECTED_EOS) Result Code: VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR (0X80BB0005) Component: ApplianceWrap Interface: IAppliance {86a98347-7619-41aa-aece-b21ac5c1a7e6}

Apparently, these OVA files should be unpackable but tar doesn't recognize it, and neither Ark or PeaZip can unzip this, but importing this OVA file works on Win 10.

I've tried using VMWare but that gave me an import error too. Why can't virtualization work at all on Arch-based systems?

"UNEXPECTED_EOS" is almost certainly "unexpected end of stream", that is, the file is missing the end or there's data corruption and the unpacker has interpreted the bad data as meaning the file should be longer than it is.

Redownload the file, or try to download it using a different tool (e.g. wget or curl rather than a browser). If that still gets a truncated file, try a different source / mirror.

Yeah you're right. I've download git-lfs and it probably works now. Thank you for your help!

Try manually 'tar xvf file.ova' however it sounds like the ova might be corrupt...

Yes these were the conclusions that I have gathered from the wise web, but then why does it work flawlessly on Windows?

This is the file (My uni uses this repo as a VM) https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Preparing-for-the-Certified-OpenStack-Administrator-Exam

It looks like typical M$ EEE strategy, stage 2: extend standard to break compatibility. But OVA images produced by different virtualization systems are almost always incompatible to each other on the level of xml metadata. Seems that just one more level of incompatibility was added in archive format.

What does the command file your_image.ova say?

Well, I've downloaded the file and it is a correct tar archive.

% file coa-aio-newton.ova          
coa-aio-newton.ova: POSIX tar archive (GNU)
% tar -tf coa-aio-newton.ova 
coa-aio-newton.ovf
coa-aio-newton_2_1-disk001.vmdk
% sha256sum coa-aio-newton.ova 
025fcb6e635e30d6592834aeba1649ef24a8c0fa079d1bbc9aa6290a8aa5e614  coa-aio-newton.ova

According to coa-aio-newton.ovf, it is created in virtualbox.

$ file coa-aio-newton.ova
coa-aio-newton.ova: ASCII text
$ tar -tf coa-aio-newton.ova
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Hmm interesting. Nevermind I have unpacked the ova file and exported the vmdk and ovf back to Linux. Thank you for your observation tho!

That file was downloaded wrong. I can guess that you used the broken dropbox link and this file contains a 404 page or you used git clone without git-lfs installed.

Absolutely right, I have only used git clone. Thank you for showing git-lfs, never heard of it before.