[Solved] headless troubles, connection refused

[ToddAndMargo]

Hi All,

Host: CentOS 5.3
Guest: WinXP-Pro-Sp3
Vm: VBox 3.0.4

I am testing the feasibility of converting a couple of my customer's servers over to use their Windows Guests as headless machines. The benefit of that is the ability to write a shutdown script in my rc5/3.d's that will "acpi power off" my VM's when the server get rebooted/shutdown. (There is a kernel update about twice a month that required a reboot. And, the users love to reboot whenever Charter goes down.)

So, I have been RTFM'ing the the manual, pages 94-96. I opened the console, went into my XP test VM's settings and told "Display", "Remote Display=enable server", "server port=3389", Authentication Method= Null", "Authentication Timeout=5000".

Then I started my test XP VM with:

Code: Select all

$ $ VBoxHeadless --startvm  VB-WinXP &
[1] 13472
VirtualBox Headless Interface 3.0.4
(C) 2008-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Listening on port 3389

The console said it was running. And

Code: Select all

$ ping 192.168.255.197
PING 192.168.255.197 (192.168.255.197) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.255.197: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=1.12 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.255.197: icmp_seq=2 ttl=128 time=0.504 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.255.197: icmp_seq=3 ttl=128 time=0.693 ms

And "rdesktop" works to one of my other customer's Terminal Server over the Internet.

When I tried to get into the test XP, I get:

Code: Select all

$ rdesktop -a 16 -N 192.168.255.197:3389 &
[1] 13922
$ Autoselected keyboard map en-us
ERROR: connect: Connection refused

<rant> AAHHHHHHHHHH!!! Okay, it did not get to me that much, so "aaaaahhhh!".</rant>

What am I doing wrong?

Many thanks,
-T

[baf]

You should connect to the host not the guest.

[ToddAndMargo]

You should connect to the host not the guest.

Thank you!

Is this why the manual wants you to user a different port for each VM?

-T

[baf]

Yup you have to or they will collide and be unusable.
Also most times you set your guest on NAT so it isn't reachable from the outside.

[ToddAndMargo]

Yup you have to or they will collide and be unusable.
Also most times you set your guest on NAT so it isn't reachable from the outside.

That explains it. Thank you.

-T

[ToddAndMargo]

If anyone is interested, I put some headless manual corrections/additions in at:
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4736#preview