[Users] ET(K) VirtualBox image and shared folders, revisited

[Ian Hinder]

On 7 Jul 2012, at 22:41, Scott Hawley wrote:

> Hi,
>  I'm revisiting the VirtualBox disk image from the workshop in April.
> Previously I had it set up to auto-mount my user directory from my Mac
> (/Users/shawley) into the VM's /home/etk-user/shawley.
> 
> 
> And it used to work (i.e. on the VM, you could see the ~shawley directory
> from my Mac).  It's not doing that anymore.  I'm not sure what changed.

Do you mean that you had everything installed and configured, and you have now run VirtualBox again and it is no longer working?  Or do you mean that you are trying to recreate the setup that you had before, and this is unsuccessful?

> I had, in /et/rc.local on the VM, the line...
> 
> mount -t vboxsf /Users/shawley /home/etk-user/shawley
> 
> I've tried this ... with and without "sudo" first, and with and without
> full path specification.

You don't need sudo, as rc.local is run as root.  

/Users/shawley is in the place of the "share name".  As far as I can tell, this is a name which you choose, not the host filesystem folder location (you have chosen it to be the same, but the system doesn't know this).  In the VM configuration, you need to share this folder explicitly, and you can give it any name.  I think your home directory is shared in virtualbox by default, but with the name "shawley".  So you probably want:

	mount -t vboxsf shawley /home/etk-user/shawley

Is your home directory configured as shared in the virtualbox settings for this VM, and if so, with this name?  The /home/etk-user/shawley needs to be a full path, as you have it.

> The "Auto Mount" flag was checked in "Settings" for the VirtualBox VM's
> "Settings" window.  Some web forums threads suggest turning that off...

I don't see why you would need "auto mount" as well as having a manual mount command in rc.local, but I'm not familiar enough with virtualbox to be sure.

> Either way, I can no longer get my directory to be shared.

What do you mean exactly by this?  Do you get an error message?  Does the folder not mount (i.e. show up in the output of the "mount" command)?  Does it mount but you can't access it, for example for permissions reasons?  Are you a member of the "vboxsf" group?  Have you tried running the mount command manually from a terminal?  It might be giving an error message (I'm not sure where the output from rc.local goes).  Please be more precise.

Have you installed the virtualbox guest additions?  You can't use shared folders without them.

In case there is something useful in it, here is a link to the virtualbox shared folders documentation:

	http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#sharedfolders

> Dennis/Frank/others?  Can someone suggest a way to (re-)achieve this?

-- 
Ian Hinder
http://numrel.aei.mpg.de/people/hinder