VirtualBox updates

Yeah, I know I'm not posting anything lately. This is totally unrelated to the blog, but I have to put it somewhere. I'll start making real posts again eventually.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 on my work laptop, and I need a Windows VM (mostly for IE stuff), so I use VirtualBox.

Problem is, every time I update my Ubuntu kernel, it breaks VirtualBox, and I always have a hell of a time on Google figuring out how to fix it. So by posting it here, hopefully I'll remember, or at least be able to find it again!

At any rate, the problem is that attempting to start a VM produces an error something like:

"Inexistent host networking interface, named 'vboxnet0'"

Ignoring the fact that "inexistent" is not actually a word, what has happened here is a problem. The real problem is not that the network interface has disappeared (although it looks that way), but that the vboxdrv kernel module isn't working properly anymore due to the kernel update. So the kernel module just needs to be recompiled, like so:

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

So all of those people out there opening bug reports and telling people not to upgrade VirtualBox are just plain wrong. This should be fixed by the developer, but what needs to be done is to have some kind of trigger in place that recompiles this module any time the kernel is updated. Hopefully this post makes its way into the Google results for this problem so that it turns up an actual solution for someone.

**EDIT: My mistake: "inexistent" is indeed a word. Apparently it's just so rare that Google wants to auto-correct it every time.