Filesystem permissions, filenames

[mschwartz]

I use virtualbox for software (WWW) development. I run windows 7 x64 as my host and virtualbox 4.0.2 with ubuntu x64 as guest.

I create my software project sources in the Windows filesystem so my IDE can scan the files, search in files is fast, etc. I have my project sources as a shared folder mounted in the guest.

First of all, the guest sees this:
% ls -ldg .
drwxrwxrwx 1 root 4096 2011-01-27 08:32

In other words, everything is rwxrwxrwx and the linux chmod command has no effect. It sure seems like the guest additions that make shared folders possible should also have the smarts to know about the guest's permissions scheme and implement it properly.

Second, in the windows environment, I accidentally created a file called foo.php where it should have been named Foo.php. In the guest, it loads Foo.php just fine because windows filenames aren't case sensitive. Yet when I deployed my project to a real live Ubuntu environment, the software failed because Linux/Unix filenames ARE case sensitive (Foo.php not found!).

Third, I tried to play around with RingoJS. I unpacked it in the Ubuntu guest in the shared folder so I could use my windows dev tools. But it tried to create symbolic links in the filesystem and those failed so it's an unworkable set up.

An option might be to create my workspace in the actual virtual disk and share that via samba or sshfs (if there is a good one for Windows). The problem here is that a lot of the windows software, especially the version control systems, do not work well (or at all) on Samba mounted partitions.

Perhaps a reverse shared folder approach for virtualbox is a good idea? In this scheme, you run some guest additions tool that exports part of the guest file system. On the host side, you're already installing virtual network devices, so installing virtual disk (removable media type?) devices could be installed as well to support this.

Maybe I'm missing something from the user's manual about getting the shared folders to work as I need them. If so, please let me know.

Otherwise I hope these suggestions make sense and get some attention.

[ianneub]

Howdy. I realize this is quite old now, but did you ever find a good solution to the case-insensitive host issue?