Proxmox 'Guest Agent not running' [workaround]

skogs · Mar 20, 2020, 1:03 AM

I feel really stupid asking this, and I honestly did search all over.

How do I fix a pfsense vm hosted inside Proxmox (qemu/kvm) host so that the guest agent works? Currently it just says under IPs: "Guest Agent not running".

Don't really mind that the IPs aren't listed, but in the instance that I want to reboot the host the pfsense box just sits there and does nothing. Doesn't try to reboot. Kind of a bummer.

Years ago I moved pfsense out of the virtualized environment into real hardware again, but I still like to play with it in the vm for misc experiments.

viragomann · Mar 15, 2020, 5:22 PM

Have you ACPI support enabled in Proxmox?

There is no Qemu guest agent inside pfSense at this time, but shutdown and reboot works fine with ACPI here.

skogs · Mar 15, 2020, 7:55 PM

Looking at the web interface it is enabled on that VM. ... just doesn't seem to do anything.

viragomann · Mar 15, 2020, 10:24 PM

When you run

dmesg | grep acpi

in the pfSense shell, do you get something back?

skogs · Mar 19, 2020, 11:27 PM

I'm clearly not bright enough to know what I'm looking for.

dmesg | grep acpi
acpi0: <BOCHS BXPCFACP> on motherboard
acpi0: Power Button (fixed)
cpu0: <ACPI CPU> on acpi0
cpu1: <ACPI CPU> on acpi0
cpu2: <ACPI CPU> on acpi0
atrtc0: <AT realtime clock> port 0x70-0x71,0x72-0x77 irq 8 on acpi0
hpet0: <High Precision Event Timer> iomem 0xfed00000-0xfed003ff on acpi0
acpi_timer0: <24-bit timer at 3.579545MHz> port 0x608-0x60b on acpi0
pcib0: <ACPI Host-PCI bridge> port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0
acpi_syscontainer0: <System Container> on acpi0
acpi_syscontainer1: <System Container> port 0xcd8-0xce3 on acpi0
acpi_syscontainer2: <System Container> port 0x620-0x62f on acpi0
atkbdc0: <Keyboard controller (i8042)> port 0x60,0x64 irq 1 on acpi0

skogs · Mar 20, 2020, 1:02 AM

At any rate fixed the issue by simply turning off the guest agent item in proxmox. System then responds to normal ACPI.

viragomann · Mar 20, 2020, 11:45 AM

@skogs
So obviously Proxmox tries to use the guest agent if it's activated and does not send ACPI signals, even if it has recognized that the agent isn't running.
Didn't know that. However, since pfSense has no Qemu guest agent there's no reason for activating it.