-----Original Message-----
From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org
[mailto:zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Jim Klimov
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 10:08 PM
To: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] Dedicated server running ESXi with no RAID card,
ZFS for storage?
On 2012-11-14 03:20, Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
> Well, I think I give up for now. I spent quite a few hours over the
> last couple of days trying to get gnome desktop working on bare-metal
> OI, followed by virtualbox. Supposedly that works in headless mode
> with RDP for management, but nothing but fail for me. Found quite a
> few posts on various forums of people complaining that RDP with
> external auth doesn't work (or not reliably), and that was my experience.
I can't say I used VirtualBox RDP extensively, certainly not in the newer
4.x series, yet. For my tasks it sufficed to switch the VM from headless to
GUI and back via savestate, as automated by my script from vboxsvc ("vbox.sh
-s vmname startgui" for a VM config'd as a vboxsvc SMF service already).
*** The thing for me is my wife needs to be able to get to her XP desktop
console when she reboots, since her company mandates encrypted disks, so at
boot time, she gets a PGP prompt before it will even boot :( Currently she
has two icons on her desktop - an RDP one for her normal "production" use,
and a VNC one to get to the ESXi machine console. If I have to diddle
things manually (or show her how to), the WAF will take a big hit. I can
already imagine the response: "everything works just fine now! Why do you
have to 'improve' things???" :) Most of my frustration is with the apparent
lack of QA at Oracle for basic things like this. Jim, I did nothing weird
or unusual. I installed virtualbox from their site, installed their
extensions pack, configured RDP for the 3 guests, fired up RDP client from
windows, and... FAIL. Google indicates their RDP server doing the
authentication somehow differently than windows expects. I dunno about that
- all I know is something basic doesn't work, and searching the web found
literally a dozen threads going back 3-4 years on this same issue. Things
like not being able to run RDP for a guest if you run it as non-root, since
it can't bind to the default low-numbered port number, so I had to use
higher-numbered ports. And on and on and on. Sorry to rant here, just
frustrated. If I was hacking on some bleeding edge setup, my expectations
are to run into things like this and get lots of paper cuts, but not for
something so basic.
> The final straw was when I
> rebooted the OI server as part of cleaning things up, and... It hung.
Last
> line in verbose boot log is 'ucode0 is /pseudo/ucode@0'. I power-cycled
it > to no avail. Even tried a backup BE from hours earlier, to no avail.
> Likely whatever was bunged happened prior to that. If I could get
something > that ran like xen or kvm reliably for a headless setup, I'd be
willing to > give it a try, but for now, no...
I can't say much about OI desktop problems either - works for me (along with
VBox 4.2.0 release), suboptimally due to lack of drivers, but reliably.
Try to boot with "-k" option to use a kmdb debugger as well - maybe the
system would enter it upon getting stuck (does so instead of rebooting when
it is panicking) and you can find some more details there?..
*** Well, I still have the OI boot disk, so I may try that sometime this
weekend when I have cycles...
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