[VBoxVmService] -> Discussion & Support

[mattz]

[breaking news]

Sourceforge has just approved VBoxVmService to be interesting enough to supply free hosting for the project.

The project's home therefore will be relocated to:

http://vboxvmservice.sourceforge.net

I will set up the site by the end of this week (sorting in the initial load of the CVS, project description and documentation).

Even though this thread will still be maintained for support reasons and release information, any further versions of VBoxVmService will be available for download from Sourceforge.

mattz

[Eagle Creek]

Well done Mattz!!

[mattz]

thanx. quite a bit proud i admit... *gg*

[Technologov]

Congratulations mattz !

[mattz]

Rapidshare downloading has been taken down in favour of Sourceforge's officially hosted downloads available from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vboxvmservice

mattz

ps: counting a total of 30 dls and rising so far. any further problems yet?

[mattz]

ATTENTION:

Supplied runtime converter b2e.exe gets FALSE POSITIVES on Avira Antivir and AVG Antivirus.

Please see: http://forum.avira.com/thread.php?threadid=16102

(thread in german)

[moonty]

Great project - thanks.

For those of you on Vista - it does work the only difference is the location of the C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService folder on Vista is:

C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile

So you need to copy your VirtualBox.xml in here to make it work.

Thanks again and keep up the good work.

Josh

[mattz]

VBoxVmService rel20080308 has arrived

What's new?

For the helper application "bat2exe.exe" was getting false positives on several antivirus systems, it has been substituted by "bcompile.exe", which should work without further problems.
The sourcecode of "bcompile.exe" can be found underneath the "src\c#\"-subdirectory.

A new "StartupMethod" flag was added to the .INI-file to support as well VRDP and SDL (the VM-controller of the OSE (Open Source Edition)).
Yet, SDL support is still sort of buggy and needs some more time and review...


The release is available from the official Sourceforge Site at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vboxvmservice


Now run off and grab it, while it's hot!


Cheers, mattz

[Hans Eberhardt]

Hi Mattz,
I tried your 20080308 release, but I didn´t suceed in starting my VRDP box.
I will try it on a clean 2003R2 server in the next time where i can do more restarts than on a productive machine.
When having more free time, I will use your c++ source and extend it in order to use the comandline switches -vrdpport and/or -vrdpaddress.
Furthermore I think it would be best to integrate all in the VBoxVmService programm instead of the many tool programms.

The plan of a system tray application to interact with the vms that are controlled by the service would be another good extension. My ideas for this VBoxVmServiceManager will be:
- displaying a table listing all running VRDP boxes with vrdpport and and vrdpaddress.
- possibility to stop, pause and start the boxes
- marking whether the boxes should startup with starting the service or not for administration and testing purposes.

Hans

[mattz]

Hello Hans.

Welcome to the Virtualbox forums and thank you for your problem report.

Could you give me some more details on what you did and what exactly went wrong? This way everyone here could benefit from a possible solution...

cheers, mattz

[mattz]

...
Furthermore I think it would be best to integrate all in the VBoxVmService programm instead of the many tool programms.

Yes, that is *definitely* the way to go here. I just didn't yet find the time to actually merge runsrv and the tools with VBoxVmService.

The plan of a system tray application to interact with the vms that are controlled by the service would be another good extension. My ideas for this VBoxVmServiceManager will be:
- displaying a table listing all running VRDP boxes with vrdpport and and vrdpaddress.
- possibility to stop, pause and start the boxes
- marking whether the boxes should startup with starting the service or not for administration and testing purposes.

That's actually almost 100% of what I have been thinking of so far - BUT: Let's not forget about SDL and the OSE-Community! I did some first tryouts, moving towards an alternative web-based control interface. I figured this might be a better approach (similar to vmware's server control panel), for it would enable true remote control of the VMs... So the task would be to either integrate a simple webserver with vboxvmservice or to split the project into the control panel application and the nt-service component. I personally prefer the second option, for it could then be used for the Linux and Mac OSX based hosts as well....

Comments, anyone?

--m

[mattz]

Since Hans had some problems getting VBoxVmService up and running, I figured I should point this one out very clear:

VBoxVmService depends on the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Files (v2005sp1 or bettter) to be installed, OR ELSE IT WILL NOT RUN!

The install package can be obtained at no charge from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=200B2FD9-AE1A-4A14-984D-389C36F85647&displaylang=en
(Version: 2005 SP1)

or the latest version (2008) from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9B2DA534-3E03-4391-8A4D-074B9F2BC1BF&displaylang=en

Even though I pointed it out in the projects description on sourceforge - people seemed to be missing the info, so I will update the docs accordingly with the next release...

Some further news:

Hans Eberhardt has recently joined the project and I think he will be a great help on the improvement of the software. So it's a call for wish lists, people!

So grab your keyboard and nail us down with feature requests! *gg*

cheers --mattz

[Hans Eberhardt]

Hi Mattz, I found out the reason for failing:
The tool bcompile which is used seems to need DotNetFramework not installed on the w2k3-server I tested it on.
cheers Hans

[mattz]

as i said in the above msg: it uses a component supplied by the visual studio runtime libraries...

cheers, mattz

[originofstorms]

howdy, great job putting this thing together! however, i am having problems getting it working...

i have narrowed the problem down to the runasv statement.
its very strange: if i run the u_0_sub.exe program manually, my vm starts up. but if i run "D:\vms\tools\runasv.exe" "D:\vms\tmp\u_0_sub.exe" \DOMAIN\user "password", the vm doesnt come up in the taskmgr list. no error message, either. this would normally lead me to believe that its runasv's fault, but if i use runasv to run anything else, like notepad or regedit etc, it works fine!

ive followed all the instructions to the letter and googled everything i can think of. help!