Make upstart job wait for VirtualBox to end gracefully

**seanlano** · August 30th, 2012

Hello everyone,

I've been trying for hours and hours to figure out a way of running a VirtualBox machine when my system boots using upstart. I've been able to get it to boot successfully, but I can't seem to make upstart wait for it to close properly. Instead the Virtual Machine just gets killed, and loses all its active state. The guest is configured to immediately shutdown when it receives the acpishutdown signal from VBoxManage.

This is my upstart script:

Code:

#Start Transmission's Virtual Machine on boot

description	"Transmission Virtual Machine"

start on (local-filesystems and net-device-up IFACE=eth0)
stop on runlevel [016]

console log

respawn
respawn limit 5 10
kill timeout 20

pre-stop script
	exec sudo -u sean VBoxManage controlvm "Transmission Server" acpipowerbutton
	inactive=0
	while [ "$inactive" == "0" ]; do
		inactive=`vboxmanage showvminfo "Transmission Server" | grep -E "No active facilities." | wc -l`
		sleep 0.5s
	done
end script

script
	exec sudo -u sean VBoxHeadless -startvm "Transmission Server"
end script

I had tried it without my attempt at the loop, and obviously that didn't work. I also tried putting all of the pre-stop script in an external script - and that partly worked, although then upstart would hang indefinitely and I also could not re-start the Virtual Machine without first rebooting the host. So that approach went from no delay, to an infinite delay.

This must be possible to do! How can I just tell upstart to wait for 20 seconds for the guest to turn off?

**CharlesA** · August 30th, 2012

I gave up on using upstart for my vbox script.

You can find my script here:
http://charlesa.net/scripts/linux/vi...ipt-ubuntu.php

There is also a script another member was working on which can be found here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1844885

**seanlano** · August 31st, 2012

Hmm, I really would have preferred to use upstart - it's much more user-friendly. Would this be a bug possibly? Even if I make the pre-stop command the VBoxManage savestate command, it will save the state but then get killed and not restore from it. Virtual Box lists it as "Aborted". Upstart just will not wait any time at all for it to end.

**seanlano** · August 31st, 2012

Having said that, the init.d script does work perfectly. Thanks!

**CharlesA** · August 31st, 2012

Glad you got it (sorta) sorted.

Don't forget to mark the thread as solved from thread tools.

**seanlano** · August 31st, 2012

Well, I'm not 100% happy with it though...

The upstart job (if it worked) would boot my VM without needing it to be in the "Saved State", and it would also respawn it if it happened to shut itself down.

Since upstart appears not to like Virtual Box, how would I add the respawn to the init.d script? Modifying it to boot my VM instead of all saved VMs shouldn't be too hard, but the respawn I'm not sure about.