I've gone through the docs and the API and I didn't see a way to do this but I wanted to confirm. My application gives a bunch of info on the state of a VM that's available through a connection created through libvirt.openReadOnly() but at some point the user might want to restart the VM let's say. This requires a full privilege connection, rather than opening a new connection I was hoping to upgrade the existing one to a full privilege connection. Just confirming that's not possible. -- Doug Goldstein