On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au> wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 16:12 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> Hi,
>> * *I was running VMWare and the program inside of Windows has crashed.
>> (Or maybe Windows crashed or maybe VMWare crashed - I cannot tell.)
>>
>> * *Gentoo is still alive and I can log in and look around but the
>> mouse on that computer but its mouse is frozen so I cannot do anything
>> at its screen. It seems the keyboard is dead also.
>
> So can you do things once logged in? *Which screen are you talking
> about? *Sounds like you're host is locked up, not just the guest?
>
>> * *top says there's nothing going on. No CPU cycles at all.
>>
>> * *Is there a way for me to ask Linux to talk to VMWare and see if it
>> can shut itself down before I hit the reset button?
>
> as in "tell VMWare to do a windows shutdown"? *Not that I'm aware of.
>
> killall -15 vmware
>
> will send the SIGTERM to all vmware named processes. *(You may need to
> use vmware-workstation, or just use ps to get the PID). *If that doesn't
> work, follow up with a
> killall -9 vmware
>
> Then if you're still stuck, gnome-session-save with either --logout or
> --force-logout should log you out nicely. *If that gets stuck, try
>
> kill -15 -1
> from your user login (not root) to kill all your processess. *Again,
> maybe a
> kill -9 -1
> is required. *It will log you out of the ssh session.
>
> If that fails (as you can tell I've done this before) try an acpi
> shutdown. *If that fails, use the magic SysRq, but I don't think you'll
> need to go that far since you can ssh in.
> --
> Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au>
>
> Simon: "My God - you're like a trained ape. *Without the training."
> * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *--Episode #7, "Jaynestown"
>
>
>

i think Mark want to know if it is possible to send commands from host
to guest. try "vmrun". i used it use send "showdown" command to my
windows guest once, and it worked. but it is not very nice to use. you
need to give the full path of the command you are going to execute.


--
Best Regards,
David Shen

http://twitter.com/davidshen84/

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Xi Shen <davidshen84@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au> wrote:
>> On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 16:12 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> * *I was running VMWare and the program inside of Windows has crashed.
>>> (Or maybe Windows crashed or maybe VMWare crashed - I cannot tell.)
>>>
>>> * *Gentoo is still alive and I can log in and look around but the
>>> mouse on that computer but its mouse is frozen so I cannot do anything
>>> at its screen. It seems the keyboard is dead also.
>>
>> So can you do things once logged in? *Which screen are you talking
>> about? *Sounds like you're host is locked up, not just the guest?
>>
>>> * *top says there's nothing going on. No CPU cycles at all.
>>>
>>> * *Is there a way for me to ask Linux to talk to VMWare and see if it
>>> can shut itself down before I hit the reset button?
>>
>> as in "tell VMWare to do a windows shutdown"? *Not that I'm aware of.
>>
>> killall -15 vmware
>>
>> will send the SIGTERM to all vmware named processes. *(You may need to
>> use vmware-workstation, or just use ps to get the PID). *If that doesn't
>> work, follow up with a
>> killall -9 vmware
>>
>> Then if you're still stuck, gnome-session-save with either --logout or
>> --force-logout should log you out nicely. *If that gets stuck, try
>>
>> kill -15 -1
>> from your user login (not root) to kill all your processess. *Again,
>> maybe a
>> kill -9 -1
>> is required. *It will log you out of the ssh session.
>>
>> If that fails (as you can tell I've done this before) try an acpi
>> shutdown. *If that fails, use the magic SysRq, but I don't think you'll
>> need to go that far since you can ssh in.
>> --
>> Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au>
>>
>> Simon: "My God - you're like a trained ape. *Without the training."
>> * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *--Episode #7, "Jaynestown"
>>
>>
>>
>
> i think Mark want to know if it is possible to send commands from host
> to guest. try "vmrun". i used it use send "showdown" command to my
> windows guest once, and it worked. but it is not very nice to use. you
> need to give the full path of the command you are going to execute.
>
>
> --
> Best Regards,
> David Shen
>

Yes, that was exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. It seems to
me that if the machine is alive and vmware is alive (as I beleive they
were) then it would be cool to tell vmplayer to reboot or shutdown
Windows gracefully so as to cause as little problems with the disk
image as possible.

I got anxious about 30-40 minutes after sending the original post to
the list and just issued a kill with no numeric value in top. vmware
closed immediately. When I restarted vmplayer Windows acted like it
does when you had to pull the plug on a physical box - complaining
that it wasn't shut down properly, etc., and went through it's checks.
The image came up fine and off it went to do some work.

Very nice thinking that since WinXP is just a disk file that I have
backed up on my network I can reload this machine in a couple of
minutes or even move it to another machine to run and not lose too
much time.

I didn't have as much luck with VirtualBox that didn't seem to like me
moving copies from one partition to another. I must go back and give
that another try as I'd like to be using Open Source but for now
VMWare is very nice.

Thanks for your responses.

Cheers,
Mark

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 1:43 AM, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Feb 2010 19:50:34 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>> I didn't have as much luck with VirtualBox that didn't seem to like me
>> moving copies from one partition to another. I must go back and give
>> that another try as I'd like to be using Open Source but for now
>> VMWare is very nice.
>
> VirtualBox isn't fully open source. There is an open source version but
> it is crippled compared with the binary release.
>
>
> --
> Neil Bothwick
>
> Top Oxymorons Number 37: Sanitary landfill
>

Hi Neil,
I guess that you're correct that it's been crippled a bit but
according to this page it doesn't seem that bad to me:

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions

I don't personally need the USB stuff inside of VB so for me it
might be enough.

Anyway, if there's no special reason that I cannot build the OSE
version on Gentoo AMD64 stable then I might go ahead and do it just to
see what happens.

Thanks,
Mark

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Feb 2010 09:29:40 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>> * *I guess that you're correct that it's been crippled a bit but
>> according to this page it doesn't seem that bad to me:
>>
>> http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions
>>
>> * *I don't personally need the USB stuff inside of VB so for me it
>> might be enough.
>
> It seems a little underhand to me, either its open source or it isn't.
> There's no good technical reason to not release the USB source, only
> commercial reasons.
>
>
> --
> Neil Bothwick
>
> The quickest way to a man's heart is through his sternum.
>
I agree, but it may be that Sun had licensed stuff like this from
someone else prior to making the project Open Source and cannot
release it.

It would be great if it got rewritten from scratch by someone not
involved so that it could be 100% Open Source, but practically
speaking it won't be an issue in terms of running the platform for
most people today.

I didn't like some of the language on that page where they said:

"It is functionally equivalent to the full VirtualBox package, except
for a few features that primarily target enterprise customers."

I don't like it when they say 'functionally equivalent' as it makes me
think it's not __exactly__ the same code. There may have been other
portions of the code they couldn't release into Open Source so some of
it has been rewritten already....

- Mark