Oracle VirtualBox Expansion Pack check

Portal User asked a question.

February 23, 2018 at 8:00 AM

I have been working with Oracle on trying to determine what devices have the VirtualBox expansion pack installed. SNOW is not picking it up in the installed software scans. SNOW sees the VirtualBox application installed, which is free, but the expansion pack requires a license, according to Oracle. I need to be able to prove to Management which machines have it installed before we buy the number of licenses Oracle thinks we should buy.

Oracle provided a command line, but it needs to be run on each machine. No way to easily do this across the Globe.

This is what they provided:

____________________________

You can try the below options to check:

Command

Linux / MacOS: VBoxManage list extpacks

Windows: VBoxManage.exe list extpacks

File presence

ExtPack-license.rtf

and this has to be executed on each laptop/desktop environment to verify the status.

______________________________

Can this be scripted within the SNOW client to gather this information? If so, can someone walk me through it?

Or know another way to find this installation?

Thank you.

Oliver Berger (Flexera Software)
8 years ago
Hi ‌, double checked the terms, only personal, educational and eval use is free. A "quick" solution could only be provided for Windows using a (currently not existing) powershell script. I don't think that the presence of a rtf text file is a proof that you have the product installed. Is there another proof of installation? It seems the installation brings some rc, r0 and dll files with it, which will be placed in a folder called Expansion Pack afterwards. I have no idea of how it would like on a OSX / Linux Machine, but there we have no option to run custom scripts. A configuration, collecting rc, r0 or s0 files would help out. Fitting SRS rules would only make sense when SLM is configured properly. Cheers Oliver
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- Christian Den Boer (Flexera Software)
  8 years ago
  I tend to agree with you Oliver, if this is the only way to determine that Oracle VM Virtualbox Enterprise is installed is to gather that file, then we would have to create a custom script for that purpose, and create a specific rule based on that file. Interesting aproach by Oracle btw, monitoring what you download. I know they do this, but they tend to focus on the expensive products. Is there any agreement that includes an audit right for this particular program? I'm amazed that Oracle would put any time and effort to audit this product, doesn't seem worth the effort for them.
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  - Portal User
    8 years ago
    Yes, at around $41 a client, seems like they are fishing for small wins. It is an annoyance for me at this point.
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- Portal User
  8 years ago
  Thank you for that. Oracle is only going on what they see that we downloaded, not what was installed. I want to be able to prove to them even through it was downloaded it is not installed. They also threw the "minimum initial purchase is 100" thing at me.
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iankimble
8 years ago
hi Mark, you need to find some way of identifying if it's installed e.g. registry entry or a particular file in a location. if it's registry then easy to tweak the client config to bring back this key and then you can query from the database, if it's a file you might need to change the config to pickup the extension. You could also identify it via a powershell script and get snow to pickup the output. if that rft file is located in c:\program files\oracle\expansion pack etc then you could probably safely say it was installed they may be fishing for small wins but it opens the door for a larger audit if they find something
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