Hi Alex,

Running VirtualBox as root is what I had to do several years ago. 
During that epoch, I did not use VirtualBox but remained with VMWare 
Workstation that did not require this very dangerous approach.  A few 
releases back, VirtualBox fixed the situation.  The problem was present 
with RHEL 4 and early RHEL 5 until VirtualBox somehow did something to 
fix the situation.  Now, with RHEL 6, the problem is back.

It is extremely dangerous to run any user application routinely as root, 
and I refuse to do this as a routine approach.  (Obviously, there are 
specific operations that must be done as root, and I routinely do these 
but with great caution and care -- root operations can be very dangerous 
to OS stability if errors are made.)

Regards,

Yasha

On 06/18/2011 11:13 PM, Alexander Hunt wrote:
> On 06/18/2011 09:46 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
>> Hi Alex,
>>
>> I have installed the guest additions.
>>
>> On the same hardware platform using the same release of Virtual Box
>> under RHEL 5.6 32 bit (CentOS 5.6), everything worked except for SAMBA
>> issues (basically, figuring out what network interfaces were being
>> used for MS Win XP Pro SP 3 to connect via the Virtual Box virtual
>> network interfaces that are seen by the guest.)
>>
>> Now under RHEL 6 X86-64 (SL 6) with a new install of Virtual Box (same
>> release number of VirtualBox) for RHEL 6 X86-64, the USB devices are
>> not working.
>>
>> I greatly would appreciate the details of what you did. I need to make
>> a new VM (e.g., a new file under linux) to install MS Win 7 Pro, but I
>> want to make certain that the MS Win XP VM is working first.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Yasha
>>
>>
>> On 06/18/2011 08:36 PM, Alexander Hunt wrote:
>>> On 06/18/2011 09:35 PM, Alexander Hunt wrote:
>>>> On 06/18/2011 09:06 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
>>>>> I am running VirtualBox current production release as a replacement
>>>>> for VMWare workstation. Under 32 bit RHEL 5, all of the hardware
>>>>> worked, including USB on the identical workstation (hardware
>>>>> platform) as I now have.
>>>>>
>>>>> Using the same configuration (including changes to the groups file),
>>>>> but now installing VirtualBox current production release for RHEL 6
>>>>> X86-64, I cannot access the USB devices. I can indirectly through
>>>>> shared folders from the MS Win guest to the linux host, but for
>>>>> certain uses, MS Win requires a direct mount, not a shared folder /
>>>>> network mount.
>>>>>
>>>>> Is anyone running SL6 X86-64 with VirtualBox and accessing the USB
>>>>> drive? If so, have you also configured VirtualBox, a MS Win guest,
>>>>> and SAMBA on the same physical machine to allow the MS Win guest to
>>>>> print to the linux host printer(s)?
>>>>>
>>>>> Yasha Karant
>>>> Hi Yasha,
>>>> I've have SL6 X86_64, Virtualbox, and running a WinXP-Pro VM working
>>>> with direct access to USB drives. It seems to me it didn't work out of
>>>> the box, but I had to install the guest additions in the VM itself to
>>>> make that work. If you already have installed the guest additions in
>>>> Windows, or try it and it doesn't work for you, let me know and I'll
>>>> figure out and document how I did it for you. Sorry I don't know about
>>>> the printer issue and Samba, I've never tried that.
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Alex
> Hi Yasha, ok, I figured it out, sort of. I have to run virtualbox as
> root user to get access to the USB sub-system. I don't know why, because
> nothing ever gets installed as root, my user is a member of the
> vboxusers and wheel groups, and has full permissions as this is my
> personal computer and nobody else uses it. That being said; that for
> some reason, regular users don't seem to get permissions to get direct
> access to the USB sub-system in a VM but there has to be some way to
> make that happen, which maybe someone else on the forum knows which
> group you need to belong to or what permissions need to be changed on
> what file(s). It isn't such a big problem for me, but it isn't an ideal
> scenario running anything as root. So, anyone else know how to get this
> working as a regular user?
> Regards,
> Alex
>
>
>
>