Archive for December, 2011

Ok, I have Linux VM’s running on a Solaris host. One thing I can never find anywhere is instructions on how to mount the shares. It is actually very easy to do.

1. Install the guest additions in the guest.

2. Select the directories you want to share to the guest via the VirtualBox control panel (Settings->Shared Folders).

3. And now the missing piece. On the linux system make your user account part of the vboxsf group, any group that should be able to get to these shares

The shares will appear in the /media folder on my Ubuntu guest prefaced with a “sf_”. So if I share the folder to the guest as Videos, I would find a /media/sf_Videos folder. If you do not add the account in question to the vboxsf group then you will see no files in the folder.

I first ran into this setting up a Plex media server in a guest. Plex could not see any files in the folder, but when you add the plex account to the /etc/group file(example below) it works like a champ.

vboxsf:x:1001:plex

This problem started after I upgraded to the latest Oracle Solaris 11 and tried to install the VirtualBox 4.1.6 update.  When I would go to add the new Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack I would enter a username and password and the install fails.

The current workaround is to use VBoxManage from the command line to install the extension pack.

VBoxManage extpack install <extension file>

I’m putting it here so I can quit looking for it every time I need it. ;)

Citizen E812 manual