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.

On 11/04/11 17:10, Mark Rogers wrote:

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.

Do you mean you are using the built in RDP server in Virtualbox (VRDP) rather than using a RDP server on the client OS ?

It's a bit broken in version 4.0.0 onwards, you need to make sure you have installed the Vbox extension packs which comes under a more restrictive non-commercial use only licence than vbox itself (thanks Oracle)

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

It used to just work in 3.sommin (OSE), the same is now true for USB and PXE boot I think.

Also if your guest machines were created in a 3.sommin installation then you need to either tweak the machine configuration file manually or disable, save changes, re-enable the RDP option in the VM settings page on the Vbox GUI (thanks again Oracle)

Also you are trying to connect to the ipaddress of the VMHost and not the ip address of the guest machine aren't you ? :)