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

[Scott Hawley]

Ian,
  Thanks for your resonse.p


>
>Do you mean that you had everything installed and configured, and you
>have now run VirtualBox again and it is no longer working?


Yes


>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.


Correct.  And as I said, even without, it doesn't mount.

  
>  /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


This was in fact the original specification I had in rc.local, which quit
working.  Thus began my "exercise" today.
 

>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.


Yes. I mispoke: 'The "Auto Mount" flag was checked in "Settings" for this
folder in the VirtualBox VM's
"Shared Folders" window.


>
>> 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.

Nor do I.  I have been trying a variety of possible solutions.

>
>> 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)?


The folder simply does not mount.

Virtual Box documentation on shared folders said that shared folders get
mounted to /media on Linux guests.  The only contents of /media  are
"cdrom" and "cdrom0"


> 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 gives me a protocol error:

% sudo mount -t vboxsf shawley /home/etk-user/shawley
/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Protocol error

Web forum-reading suggests that the combination of "Auto-Mount" being
checked and trying to mount from the command-line will produce the above
protocol error.  Shutting down the VM, unchecking Auto-Mount and
rebooting, I get the same error.

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

Yes.

>
>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


Thanks.  That was the first thing I read, before trying any of this. ;-)