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VirtualBox, WinXP, RDP and Fedora 9 ?

Posted: 10. Aug 2008, 21:08
by grayfox
Hi,

I am running WinXP as a guest under Fedora 9 using Virtual Box. ( all the latest software versions). I am using the "Host Interface tap0" so I can use a fixed IP.

On the Fedora side tap0 has an IP of 192.168.1.65, the XP guest has an IP of 192.168.1.63.

It appears to me that if I am on another machine on my local net that I have to "talk" to the tap0 address and not the internal ip that the guest has. On the other hand when I, say ftp from the guest to other boxes, it appears that the connection is from the internal address of the client.

My problem is that I cannot ( properly) connect to the XP guest via RDP from other boxes.

I am also running a guest XP on a MacOSX system using VMWare Fusion. If I use the RDP program in the XP guest on the Mac, I can connect but the display is "futzed" up. It sorta looks like I get two sorta offset views into the XP guest on fedora and the result is basically unusable.

I can use RDP on the fedora guest to talk to the XP guest on the mac. I downloaded the Remote Desktop for the Mac from Microsoft and it cannot connect to the guest XP in Fedora ( no error messages, just a spinning wheel...)

The mac program can connect to the XP guest running on the mac and if I reboot fedora into XP it can connect to the "native" XP. So, has anyone been able to use RPD to connect to an XP guest running VirtualBox on Fedora 9?

Thanks,

Jerry

Posted: 10. Aug 2008, 21:17
by frank
Are you aware that VirtualBox provides its own RDP server? That is, if you enable the RDP server in the GUI, you can connect to that server instead to the guest.

Using the IP of the host side of the TAP interface is wrong, you will connect to the host itself. Use in any case the guest IP. If that does not work, check the firewall settings for both the guest and the host.

Posted: 10. Aug 2008, 22:02
by grayfox
Frank Mehnert wrote:Are you aware that VirtualBox provides its own RDP server? That is, if you enable the RDP server in the GUI, you can connect to that server instead to the guest.

Using the IP of the host side of the TAP interface is wrong, you will connect to the host itself. Use in any case the guest IP. If that does not work, check the firewall settings for both the guest and the host.
Whoops, I thought I had the latest 1.6.2 ...just found out that 1.6.4
is out.

I installed 1.6.4 and rdp is much better behaved...I can connect from
the ms rdp mac program and also from within winxp running as a guest
on macosx running fusion.

It is hard to predict what the resolution of the displayed screen is going
be be ;(

Oh well at least it works :)

Posted: 10. Aug 2008, 22:26
by TerryE
grayfox wrote:It appears to me that if I am on another machine on my local net that I have to "talk" to the tap0 address and not the internal ip that the guest has.
This is where you are almost right but not quite. Think about it, the as far as the VM is concerned its console/display is a VGA device. When you do a
  • VBoxHeadless -s yourVM - p 4000
then the Headless process running on the host uses XPCCOM to start up the VM and it acts the RDP server. So in this case if you are logged onto the host, then you just connect to locahost:4000 or if your host is fred.mydomain.org then from other workstations you just connect to fred.mydomain.org:4000 to make your RDP session.

Posted: 11. Aug 2008, 13:17
by frank
Just to explain my last statement using the host IP of the TAP interface is wrong: This is necessary if you want to directly connect to the guest. If you want to connect to the VBox RDP server, use the host IP of course.