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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
>>
>