I have looked at https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/faq/
and cannot find what I am suggesting in this posting.
As you read below, my "easter egg hunt" seems to have found a solution
to a specific problem with RHEL 6 X86-64, including SL 6. I am assuming
that my experience is not unique, and that a hunting/search through the
archives of this list probably would yield solutions to other issues
(such as how to add /dev/floppy to SL 6 that was present in previous
major RHEL releases).
Would the Fermilab/CERN maintainers of the SL 6 documentation consider
collecting all of these solutions in one place? Assuming that
subscribers to this list are professionals (including students from the
various research and support groups that may be doing the actual
technical work), rather than having the maintainers sift this list, the
users of this list could have a special drop box email address for items
that need consideration. The cumulative solution list would include
references and the evidence for successful tests (e.g., Hunt's note below).
Red Hat does not provide this sort of information as public knowledge
because Red Hat uses support (this sort of information) as a revenue
generator.
Is this possible?
Yasha Karant
On 06/19/2011 04:35 PM, Alexander Hunt wrote:
On 06/19/2011 11:54 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
There is a long thread on this topic on:
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=33268
on page 2 (with a URL of:
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=33268&sid=d55ee7c6fce4a214961f00c766b90919&start=15
)
on Board index ‹ General ‹ VirtualBox on Linux Hosts with a specific
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
The modification of /etc/rc.d, edit rc.sysinit (as above) works
perfectly here with no apparent interference with mounting USB drives to
the SL6 installation.
Many Thanks,
Alex
