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topic of VirtualBox guest USB inoperative on RHEL 5.5 64-bit host
Note that this problem did not happen on RHEL 5.5 32-bit host based upon
my direct experience (CentOS 5.5 and 5.6, but presumably as SL and
CentOS are faithful to RHEL, the issue would be common to all three
using X86-64 distributions).
The most salient explanation I quote here:
Re: VirtualBox guest USB inoperative on RHEL 5.5 64-bit host
Postby zzz » 7. Oct 2010, 00:03
This comment relates mostly to CENTOS/REDHAT distributions. As mentioned
in many previous posts the problem is usually with the permissions on
usbfs. Centos mounts the usbfs first thing during boot. Once
/proc/bus/ubs is mounted, its permissions cannot (so I have heard)
really be changed. Thus, changing fstab or several other suggestions do
not seem to work with this operating system. It turns out the the
original mount is in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit. All you have to do is edit
this file and add the group and its permissions to the mount
instruction. Here is an example, of the changes where the group id is
devgid=501 which is the group id of vboxusers.
In /etc/rc.d, edit rc.sysinit
Replace the two lines
mount -n -t usbfs /proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb
and
modprobe usbcore >/dev/null 2>&1 && mount -n -t usbfs /proc/bus/usb
/proc/bus/usb
With
modprobe usbcore >/dev/null 2>&1 && mount -n -t usbfs /proc/bus/usb
/proc/bus/usb -o devgid=501,devmode=664
mount -n -t usbfs /proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb -o devgid=501,devmode=664
Note that you can get the gid of vboxusers by doing "grep vboxusers
/etc/group". If it is not 501, then replace 501 with the correct gid.
Also, make sure that you are a member of the group: "gpasswd -a
youruserid vboxusers"
End quote.
I will try the above on Monday 20 June 2011 and report if it works. If
so, may I strongly urge the SL6 documentation persons to please make a
note of this, and perhaps considering changing SL6 from RHEL6 in this
regard, documenting the change in the release notes?
Yasha Karant
On 06/19/2011 05:32 AM, Alexander Hunt wrote:
On 06/19/2011 06:31 AM, Alexander Hunt wrote:
On 06/19/2011 01:08 AM, Jason Bronner wrote:
alex, instead of giving Virtual Box root or even sudo
access might it not be more secure to use the VMWare
Player only app. since it doesnt seem to have the
problems associated with hardware recog. and lock
users into a specific hardware config / shares /
security template? i've never actually used virtual
box for anything as i've had generally good luck with
VMware in the past in addition to the numerous VMWare
apps for creating blank layouts, cloning, and
whatnot. I like using them for test-platform
appliances between compiles to ensure our updates
actually update and dont break the accounting
systems. (Player's free, and there's EL binaries
available.)
Hi, Thanks for the info, I'm going to try out VMWare Player now and
see how that goes. I used to like VMFusion for the Mac, so I'm
thinking I'll like it. I never have liked running much of anything
under root unless I absolutely have to. There are also a couple of
intersting other comments about USB access being fine with a Solaris
install and it working without root in previous versions of
Virtualbox. It seems to me I didn't have that problem with F13 or F14
either.
Thanks all,
Alex
