Can't read shared folders

[MacCruiskeen]

That pretty much sums up the problem: when I try to open a shared folder, I get an error "The specified folder does not exist or was not readable."

My system: host: mac os x 10.6.8. VB 4.2.6. Guest: Linux Mint 13 w/KDE. I've got the guest additions installed, and I figured out how to add myself to the vboxsf group. I've tried changing the sharing and permissions settings on the mac, but nothing seems to help. I can see the folders on my guest, they show up as mounted in /media, I just can't see anything in them. What am I missing?

[MacCruiskeen]

Well, I guess I solved my problem. I was using automount to set up the folders, but I unmounted the folders and set them up as manual mount. Then I mounted them to a folder in my home directory. This appears to have solved the permissions issues. Automount doesn't seem to have any way to specify a mount location, just the default.

[RokeyKokey]

Yeah; per https://discuss.kde.org/t/the-specified ... anlockhart, it appears to be a generic error when Dolphin attempts to access a directory that isn't mounted any more.

[Nick_k]

I ran into something similar before, and in my case it ended up being a Guest Additions mismatch. The shared folder would still show up under /media, but when I tried to open it I’d get that “folder does not exist or was not readable” error.
What fixed it for me was simply reinstalling Guest Additions so it matched the VirtualBox version on the host, then rebooting the guest. After that, the shared folder worked normally.

[linktek]

Well, I guess I solved my problem. I was using automount to set up the folders, but I unmounted the folders and set them up as manual mount. Then I mounted them to a folder in my home directory. This appears to have solved the permissions issues. Automount doesn't seem to have any way to specify a mount location, just the default.

Mount points should never be established inside a users $HOME. Linux provides two directories to manage share resources as a practice.
/mnt
/media
Using the /etc/fstab is the typical method to configure mounted shares (whether they are NFS, CIFS, or vboxsf).

Here are three example:
In each use case root must be used to create the mount points in /mnt and /media
1000 is the UID of the local user

Code: Select all

# CIFS mount
//192.168.0.2/smb_share /media/share_folder cifs _netdev,credentials=/home/user/.smb,uid=1000,gid=1000,nounix,vers=3.0,x-systemd.automount,file_mode=0644 0 0

# NFS mount
192.168.0.2:/mnt/exported_share /mnt/share_folder nfs defaults,_netdev,nofail,x-systemd.automount 0 0

# VBOX
SHARE /mnt/windows_share vboxsf _netdev,uid=1000,gid=1000,dmode=0775,fmode=0664,x-systemd.automount 0 0