virtual box
I was playing around with a VM remotely. Without much thinking i setup a VPN and hit enter after the connect command.
It worked fine, or rather i suspect it did because it blocked the connection to the router through which i accessed it.
Now I could have gotten in the car and driven over to the thing or just ignored it as it had no real use anyway. But it turns out it was too hard for me to just ignore it. That had to be fixable remotely.
I would have expected virtualbox to have some sort of serial console or something like that. And iam sure it has a host of ways to recover this nicer but what i found first and that worked was this:
vboxmanage controlvm (name) screenshotpng this.png ; ffplay this.png vboxmanage controlvm (name) keyboardputstring "foobar" vboxmanage controlvm (name) keyboardputscancode 12 34 56
With these we can look at the screen and we can enter things, thats more than enough to recover it. One thing to keep in mind is that the keyboardputstring commend seems to assume a us keyboard layout.
The 2nd thing to keep in mind if you use this for a similar case, you want to make sure you do not put any passwords into any shell history files. At least not without realizing it and changing the password then