virtualbox.org

I have one server that I use for testing and another that is in production and both are running the same OS. Now the problem, the server used for testing always sends the guest to a full screen mode and disables the keyboard.
I have looked at the configuration on both servers and they are the exact same including the guest OS. The hdd is the same for both machines by way of cloning.

I'm stumped as to what is happening that on the test server the guest goes full screen while the production guest does not which is what I want. Both have the vbox addin loaded, both are running Redhat EL4 as the host OS and the guest OSs are redhat EL4 OSs.

Any help resolving this delima would be greatly appreciated as it puts me in a real bind.

The only difference between the 2 servers are the age. One is a proliant 1850R and the other is proliant DL380. Both have the same amount of ram. The real difference is the CPU which is 600 MHz versus 1.4 MHz.

Please help this is driving me crazy and is causing development to occur on the production server instead of the testing server where it should be occurring.

thanks in advance for any assistance.

Get out of Fullscreen by hitting Host+F. If that doesn't work, you can always check the XML of the problematic VM and look for the fullscreen entry. Change it to off to disable fullscreen on it until you manually set it to go to fullscreen.

I have already checked to see if full screen is turned on and it is not. The xml shows it as being off. As I said in my original post after starting the vm it goes to full screen and also disables the keyboard. Hitting the numlock key will not even turn the light on for the numlock and the same for the caps lock.

Thanks for the reply though.

Any other thoughts? Is it possible that it may be running in headless mode? I can ssh into the machine and run commands but that still doesn't solve my problem though.

Is your keyboard connected through USB and do you have USB enabled for the VM? If you answer "yes" to both questions, then disable USB in the VM settings and try again.

No the keyboard and mouse are PS2. This particular system does not have or even support USB.

This server was running windows at one time which did report USB but after digging deeply into the Compaq documentation it is not a supported function unless a usb host controller is added via the PCI card slots. Device manager did report a USB controller but could NOT load drivers because there are no USB controllers native on the motherboard.

Thanks for the reply though.

Also just found that I can start this vm through vnc. Then ssh into the vm and the screen is fine like it should be on the server but is not. Although this is a temporary solution it just isn't what I'm looking for as depending what is in the development stage a crash of vnc will mean a loss of whatever is in the pipeline of the development stage at the time of the crash, meaning all work would be lost. I've personally experienced this previously with other VM applications and is the main reason I need to resolve this problem.

This is a very confusing problem that just doesn't make any sense as to what is happening.

Does vbox write out any log files that I could reveiw and possibly post that may make trouble shooting this problem easier?

VB does create logs during run-time. You can view them if you select the VM, then hit the Machine menu and hit Logs. They are saved to the hard drive too, in the machine folder.