[SOLVED] VirtualBox shared folders

[Mage of Maple]

Hello,

I'm having an issue with shared folders. (they don't work.) My host is Mint 19 and my guest in Mint 19. I'm running the network in bridged mode. I have guest additions installed. A created the share with AutoMount set to yes. I've turned the firewall off on both host and guest. If it matters, I'm running Mullvad VPN on both the host and the guest.

Basically, I see nothing mounted in /media/greg. Attempting to mount it manually gives "mounting failed with the following error: Protocol error"

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Greg

[redlined]

hi Greg!

I'm new to linux and don't use virtualbox but I really think it is VPN setup, especially if both host and guest are each connected to VPN and routes are complicting things by doing so- unless you've got routes tweaked as a known issue.

This help/answer response may help with your issue which sounds close enough related to fix your issue:
https://superuser.com/questions/987150/ ... hrough-vpn

[AndyMH]

I assume you have set up shared folders in VB through the settings:

Screenshot from 2018-12-16 22-38-49.png

Then in the VM (in my case win7) they appear as network drives (so I suspect with mint in a VM you need to go computer > network):

Capture.PNG

[ajgringo619]

Once you get it running, make sure you're in the vboxsf group on the guest.

[Mage of Maple]

Thanks for the help, everyone. I've got it working now. It was something I wasn't even thinking of but I should have been - not the first time this has burned me.

VirtualBox was running under Firejail. When I installed Firejail, I used firecfg to automatically set up sandboxing for all installed apps that it had default configurations for. Unfortunately, this creates various problems. It breaks the Linux Mint "X-Apps" entirely, which I solved by just unlinking them from /usr/local/bin. (I don't need my text editor sandboxed.) But I do like the idea of having VirtualBox sandboxed. The primary reason I run a Mint VirtualBox guest on a Mint host is so that I can do some things with less fear of corrupting my system. Most notably, I use Wine and this potentially exposes me to Windows viruses, so I do that in my guest (along with most things I do), but do all online banking, etc, on the host. In theory, it should not be possible for a virus to bust out of a VM anyway, but sandboxing gives me another layer of protection. Unfortunately, it breaks the shared folders, which I guess kinda makes sense as that would be a potential avenue for escape (although networking in general does work.) I guess I need to look into the Firejail configuration stuff and see if I can change the profile for VirtualBox to allow this...

Anyway, thanks everyone!

[Laugh2]

Once you get it running, make sure you're in the vboxsf group on the guest.

Thank you, ajgringo619. You comment solved my problem - I was being told I didn't have permissions to access the folder when inside my Guest. Adding myself to this group (also inside the Guest) solved the problem.

For anyone unfamiliar with how to do this, I found a CLI command by 1Fallen at https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2411025:

sudo usermod -G vboxsf -a myusername

change "myusername" to your login user name and make sure the VirtualBox Guest Additions are installed. Reboot.

My System
Host: LM18.3 64-bit
VirtualBox Version 6.0.6 r130049 (Qt5.6.1)
Guest: LM 19.1 64-bit