Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 Startup Script

[jonathanross]

Hi all,

I'm banging my head against a wall with this one. All I need is to start a Vbox machine before login (as a service) as user "jonathan".

I have a script mounting two drives at boot as "root" perfectly:

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mount /dev/sdc1 "/media/VB"
mount /dev/sdb2 "/media/VIRTUAL"

and when I login as "jonathan" the line manually added to "Startup Applications" works fine too with:

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vboxmanage startvm "XP Pro"

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I just need a VM to start before anyone logs in as part of a "/etc/init.d" script (I used update-rc.d to add the mount script to all the runlevels correctly).

It's probably an enviroment issue. I've tried various combinations of "sudo" and "su -" like:

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su - jonathan -c vboxmanage startvm "XP Pro"

Please help save my sanity !

JR

[baf]

First impression:
It should be VBoxManage

[jonathanross]

Thanks for your help, but no joy

Looking at it running "VBoxManage startvm "XP Pro" as jonathan fails too, it just works when the "Startup Applications" entry is triggered ...

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VBoxManage startvm "XP Pro"
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 2.1.4_OSE
(C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Waiting for the remote session to open...
[!] Full error info present: true , basic error info present: true 
[!] Result Code = NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005) - Operation failed
[!] Text        = Virtual machine 'XP Pro' has terminated unexpectedly during startup
[!] Component   = Machine, Interface: IMachine, {ea6fb7ea-1993-4642-b113-f29eb39e0df0}
[!] Callee      = <NULL>, {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}

Argh it must be very simple ! I've followed the other posts here without luck.

JR

[jonathanross]

Okay, scrap that. I can start it off the command line. I must have broken some environment variables during my tests.

JR

[jonathanross]

Well. I'm disappointed ...

No-one has a VM start as a service pre-login on virtualbox-ose ?

The other non-ose scripts on the forum don't work at all.

The lack of replies is destroying my faith in Virtual Box.

[cataleptico]

Hi,
i had the same problem you have, though i wasnt trying to start a vm at login. Basically if i started a vm with VBoxManage startvm from ssh/screen, i would get that same error, but if i did it with the VirtualBox main window (the list of vms) it worked. So i figured i needed to set the DISPLAY envvar:

export DISPLAY=:0

and it worked without the main window open. i hope this helps you.

[jonathanross]

THANK YOU !

That's great.

JR

[jonathanross]

It helps but I can't quite get it working

All I'm doing is:

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#!/bin/bash
export DISPLAY=":0"; su jonathan -c "/usr/bin/vboxmanage startvm XP"

This works as "root" not as "sudo -s" perfectly but then not during boot.

JR

[markba]

I'm investigating this also. As I'm the developer/author of vboxtool, capable of auto starting and stopping sessions, this particular error came up, *after* I upgraded to Jaunty. The vboxtool scripts worked fine until then. Thus, this might me a problem related to Jaunty.

See this bug report in vboxtool (which I created my self):
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.p ... id=1111629

My investigations so far: starting sessions with VBoxManage in a system context (e.g. rc.local or the init.d system, used by vboxtool), is showing this error (same as posted above):

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Waiting for the remote session to open...
ERROR: Virtual machine 'Ubuntu JeOS' has terminated unexpectedly during
startup
Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component Machine, interface
IMachine, callee <NULL>

VBox.log is not showing errors or warnings (see attached log file on the mentioned vboxtool bug), only this:

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00:00:15.545 Changing the VM state from 'DESTROYING' to 'TERMINATED'.

Using 'export DISPLAY=:0' is not helping.

[jonathanross]

Thanks, Mark.

If you wouldn't mind posting any findings here it'd be greatly appreciated !!

JR

[markba]

Of course,we should work this out together. After this is over, maybe you can use vboxtool also (see my sig), because it's doing exactly what you are doing, only in a more flexible way (by configuration). But first, let's see if we can break this bug.

Here, they seem to have the same problem: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=71267
Because this is on arch-linux, but quite recent, probably it's a kernel thing.

Also here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7243302
I notified them.

[markba]

I've found a solution in this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1144800

I preceded the command(s) in vboxtoolinit (which resides in /etc/init.d) with 'nohup' and it magically works!

But it is still a workaround, the real solution lies in solving the bug in the Ubuntu init system: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/372633

[jonathanross]

Thank you !

Will give it a shot !

JR

[dmgeurts]

Am also on Ubuntu 9.0.4, headless server setup and after a reboot I have to manually start the VM's. my init script has the nohup in there as I installed vboxtools v0.4.

I think it broke last month. Built the server, all was fine. Went on holiday, and now it's busted...
No idea what info to provide or how to troubleshoot, sorry.