For a friend who lives 50 km away I run a server with openSUSE 11.1.
To minimize traveling there I have the server running as a VM on a small 
system also running openSUSE 11.1.
He want to be able, when the physical system breaks down, to resume operation 
immediately with only one day loss of data, which may be recovered later.
So he has a second system also running its own version of the small openSUSE 
11.1 system. I did copy the ~/.VirtualBox directory from the first small 
system to the second and also copied the the 3 .vdi files making sure they 
have the same path on the second system as on the first system. After that I 
use the GUI to disable network adapter 1 and enable adapter 2.
The guest on system 1 will have eth0 as the network interface and on system 2 
eth1. The guest has a different configuration (only IP-address) for eth0 and 
eth1. I start the guest on both systems using 
VBoxManage startvm name -type vrdp
After that both guests run without problems and the one on system 1, providing 
the services, works all day. At the end of the day both guests are halted 
using "VBoxManage controlvm name acpipowerbutton and I use rsync to sync the 3 
.vdi files.
Starting the guest on system 2 is done to test things I am not sure will work.
So on this system I either use "rdesktop -N -k en-us localhost" or "ssh 
root@<ip-address>" ending up on the console of the guest as root.
The problem is with the update of the software on the guest. I use zypper for 
that. Sometimes immediately, but also after updating a few packages, zypper is 
downloading a package. It is showing the percentage of the download, which can 
be 0% or any other value, the guest system halts in a peculiar way. The 
VirtualBox GUI shows the system running. The rdesktop or ssh is still on the 
screen of the base system, but keyboard action is ignored. CPU usage is almost 
0; the guest does not seem to use any CPU. After that I do an acpipowerbutton 
or a poweroff in which case the status of the guest is changing but the guest 
remains there doing nothing. I have to use the kill command to end the guest.
Starting it up again is no problem and I sometimes can do a few other updates 
of a package, but sooner or later the guest hangs. When I do an update of the 
kernel, only downloading the package until now (tried it 3 times), it always 
halts with a shown download of 0%.

Anybody experiencing the same hanging state of the guest?

-- 
fr.gr.

Freek de Kruijf

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