Mark,
I use this to access a Windows VM on my office machine at work.
One thing that got me recently when upgrading to v4 was that you have to load the RDP module from Sun before VirtualBox will accept vRDP connections.
The relevant manual page is here http://bit.ly/gLYuli - if memory serves it was a doddle to install the module into VirtualBox once I'd figured out that was missing after my upgrade.
As a side note, I find that xfreerdp (http://www.freerdp.com) plays nicer than plain old rdesktop :)
Hope this helps,
Jim
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Rogers" mark@quarella.co.uk To: "ALUG - mailing list" main@lists.alug.org.uk Sent: Monday, 11 April, 2011 5:10:42 PM Subject: [ALUG] Virtualbox RDP
Does anyone here use RDP access to a VirtualBox host?
I have a couple of VBox 4.0.x installs, one on a Windows host, one on an Ubuntu host. Both are configured to allow RDP access on port 5000. Neither actually allow it but I'm not getting any useful errors to tell me what might be wrong. Eg changing the RDP client (mstsc or rdesktop) to a different port without changing the server port (thus guaranteeing a failed connection) gives me the exact same symptoms as giving the correct port details.
Googling all I find is lots of instructions on what to do (and it isn't hard to configure), with very few people seemingly having any problems once they've set it up, so I don't understand why I'm having problems on multiple machines. (I've tried a few times before without success too, and I've never once had it work, so I'm sure I'm the problem!)
In the past I've just worked around it but I now need to set up a headless virtual machine so I'm going to be a bit stuck if I can't get it to work.