VNC Display Doesn't Update, VM Appears Frozen

[Skro]

I noticed an issue this week with my VMs that I think may be a bug, but I thought I'd throw it out here to see if someone else had the issue/fix. I looked in the forums and bugs but didn't find anything that matched the issue.

I recently updated from 11.1-U4 to U5.

I noticed my two Ubuntu 16.04 VMs were acting odd. My plex server suddenly switched to wireless and appeared frozen and the other VM running a game server appeared stuck at boot in the blank purplish screen. After some investigating and attempts to rebuild, I realized a couple of things. The wireless issue appears to have been with using the Intel e1000 adapter as a NIC, which I had not had issues with in the past, but is discussed in the forums. Changing that seemed to fix it.

The other issue that I think may be a bug is that both VMs were not updating the display in VNC (web or desktop). In simple terms, they were showing an image rather than a movie. I could click on something or type something and nothing onscreen changed, so I thought the VMs were frozen, but if I closed the VNC viewer and reopened it, the changes were in the new image. Nothing I did fixed it. I tried updating my VNC viewer, rebooting the VMs, rebooting the NAS, creating new VMs, and changing the resolution (they were all running approved resolutions discussed here in the forums and in the UI). This morning, I switched back to 11.1-U4 and that fixed it immediately.

Anybody else noticed this VNC display issue?

 

[dlavigne]

Were you able to resolve this?

 

[Skro]

Switching back from U5 to U4 fixed it. I think it is might be a bug in 11.1-U5.

 

[dlavigne]

If it persists once BETA1 is out, please create a report at bugs.freenas.org.

 

[Skro]

I installed U-6 this week and it all seems fine. I will keep an eye on it when I have a chance to set up a test instance for beta releases.

 

[jaaassh]

This issue where VNC isn't refreshing is happening to me now on FreeNAS-11.1-U6. Nothing I type updates the screen, but if I reconnect VNC Viewer, then I can see updates.

 

[Skro]

This issue where VNC isn't refreshing is happening to me now on FreeNAS-11.1-U6. Nothing I type updates the screen, but if I reconnect VNC Viewer, then I can see updates.

Hmm, I'm no expert but going back to 11.1-U4 worked for me, although I did rebuild my VMs in the process of trying to figure out what was happening so YMMV.

I can say that I am currently running 11.2 RC2 and have not had the problem since moving to 11.2. However, this is still in beta as of today (I think the official release is tomorrow) and it includes significant changes to jails (moving from warden to iocage) and changes that make rolling back difficult/impossible once you update your pools. So, I'd recommend researching and considering all of that before making any leaps to 11.2.