Michael Thayer wrote:
> Hello Lew and all,
> 
> Lew Wolfgang wrote:
>> After a lot of fiddling and non-deterministic behavior I isolated the
>> problem to multiple mounting of the  usbfs filesystem.
> As of VirtualBox 2.1.2 (with a couple of fixes in 2.1.4), USB on Linux
> hosts should work without mounting /proc/bus/usb at all.  Judging from
> the reports (like this thread), this does not work for everyone.  It
> would be great if some of the people experiencing problems could help to
> troubleshoot this.
> 
> First of all, I will briefly explain the technical background.  In order
> for guests to access USB devices, they have to be able to read and write
> the device nodes for those devices.  Those device nodes are now found
> under /dev/bus/usb.  (To find out which node belongs to which device,
> look for the device in the output of the "lshal" application.)
> 
> If everything is set up correctly, most of the USB device nodes (that
> is, those that are not assigned to someone else by the system) should be
> readable and writable to the group "vboxusers".  So users who want to
> use USB in VirtualBox should of course be members of that group.  (BTW,
> when a user becomes a member of a group in Linux, they have to log in
> and out again before the change really takes effect.)  VirtualBox can
> detect the devices even if the user can't read or write them - this is
> when the devices are shown as "greyed out".
> 
> So, if things are not working, some things to look at for starters are:
> 
> * Does the group "vboxusers" exist, and which users are members?
> 
> $ cat /etc/group | grep vboxusers
> vboxusers:x:1001:michael
> 
> * Logging in and out, or rebooting will guarantee that those users
> really are members of the groups.
> * Is the device node of the device you want to access readable and
> writable for that group?  e.g.
> 
> $ ls -l /dev/bus/usb/001/001
> crw-rw-r-- 1 root vboxusers 189, 0 2009-02-24 08:46 /dev/bus/usb/001/001

Hi Michael,

I was seeing this in /dev/bus/usb/001 after booting:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  77 2009-02-19 08:42 003

If I manually typed "mount -a" the group and permissions would
be reset and things would work.  I tried it both without the mod
to /etc/fstab and with.  Placing mount -a in boot.local didn't
work, I assume, because usb was being mounted by /etc/init.d/pcscd
invocation.

The box I was working on was delivered to my customer so I don't
want to fiddle with it any more, but I'll be glad to set up another
one as a test bed.  Hopefully it will display the same indication.

Thanks for your help,
Lew


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