acpipowerbutton and Other Users problem

[ToddAndMargo]

Guest: Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows XP Pro SP3 Host: CenbtOS 5.4

Hi All,

Would you guys please consider fixing this for me. I am at risk of data corruption (why the "critical" priority). It is also a total pain in the neck.

This is the command I use to shut down my headless Windows guests:

/usr/bin/VBoxManage controlvm $VM_Name acpipowerbutton

In theory, it works perfectly. In practice, it is a disaster. If you watch your "head" with VRDP, you will notice a pop up on your Windows guest to the effect: "Other people are logged on". And, you *never* shut down. So, you backup a running VM with dump. Or, you reboot/shutdown your host and kill all your headless VM's and corrupt the heck out of them. As I said: a disaster.

Supposedly, and I have not checked this, you can modify the following Windows command to shut your headless VM's down:

shutdown /s /m \%Headless_VM_IP% /t 10 /c "Shutdown:PowerFailure" /f /d U:6:12

I have tried this inside the Windows guest and it does work. I just have not modified it for Linux and tried it from the host.

This is such a disaster. Would you guys please come up with a method to actually shut down a headless VM under actual operating conditions with VBoxManage? I would really, really appreciate it.

Many thanks, -T

[ToddAndMargo]

I wrote a work around:

​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=24719#p112269

As the workaround requires knowing the IP address of the guest and having an IP connection to the guest, it would be nice to be able to do this from "VBoxManage controlvm"

-T

[Frank Mehnert]

Well, this is clearly a bug of the guest. All what VBox does it sending the ACPI event power button pressed to the guest. It is up to the guest to decide if this event should be ignored or not. Exactly the same happens when pressing the power button of a real machine. You already selected the correct category enhancement.

[ToddAndMargo]

Since the "ACPI event power button pressed" does not get past the "Other users are logged in" prompt, how about adding an addition event called "Power Failure", since it gets past the pop ups?

[Frank Mehnert]

This isn't possible for technical reasons. VBox does not know what the guest is doing. And the event power button pressed can be configured to another action, for instance open a menu and the user can still decline.

[Nikolay Igotti]

Yet, you can practically use combination of ACPI power button and keyboard press emulation. For example, using vboxshell.py one can use following commands:

powerbutton vm_name tg vm_name "\n"

Or with appropriate "&DOWN;" keypresses, if current menu element if not what you want.