xVM and VBoxManage report virtual machine as aborted when it is running correctly

[Glynn Bird]

OK. The host is a Centos 5.2 machine. We have several Centos 5.2 (text-only) guest machines cloned from one original. All works fine unless you change the settings (in this case, the network configuration) of one of the switched off guests (keira). The xVM GUI then crashes. When it runs again, it reports one of the running machines as "aborted", even though it is running correctly (see "reese").

The offline guest whose configuration was being edited ("keira") is reported as "Powered Off", but the "settings" button is now no longer available.

A reboot of the host usually solves the problem, but this means downtime for all of the guests.

Another headache is that the guest that is marked as "aborted" can be started by clicking on the green arrow, even though it is already running! This isn't good.

An

[Glynn Bird]

The latest VBoxLog file

[Glynn Bird]

Output of VBoxManage list vms

[Frank Mehnert]

How did you clone the VMs? Any chance to attach a .tar.bz2 of your complete ~/.VirtualBox directory, without the HardDisks subdirectory of course?

[Glynn Bird]

Virtual Box files - tar of .VirtualBox, without hard disks

[Glynn Bird]

The machines were cloned using:

cd .VirtualBox/HardDisks VBoxManage clonehd lily.enablemedia.com.vdi keira.enablemedia.com.vdi

for example. Then using the GUI, the new Virtual machine was created using the new .vdi as its hard disk. Start up the machine, reconfigure its network settings etc. I've uploaded the .VirtualBox files

[Frank Mehnert]

Thanks. You cloned the VMs the correct way. Though still no idea why the GUI crashes. Could you try the following:

• Edit the setting of a VM which is currently powered off. According to your findings the GUI should crash now
• Please check if the VBoxSVC daemon and the VBoxXPCOMIPCD daemon are still running (e.g. ps aux|egrep 'VBoxSVC|VBoxXPCOM').

If one of these daemons doesn't run anymore then this could be a hint what's going wrong.

[Glynn Bird]

I'll try this tomorrow morning (out of office hours). Thanks.

[Glynn Bird]

Ok. From a fresh reboot, I started xVM and started up the guest "reese" (the machine that tends to be reported as aborted). Once it had completed its boot sequence I edited the settings of the non-running vm "keira" to change the network settings from "Local interface" to "NAT", and xVM hung.

Gnome said that xVM had stopped responding and did I wish to force quit the applicaiton. I did. Reese was still running correctly. I ran xVM again and it reported reese as "Aborted" and wouldn't let me edit the settings of Keira. This is quite repeatable.

The daemons were still running.

[Frank Mehnert]

Please retry with the latest release 2.2.2, not unlikely that your bug was fixed.