virtualbox.org

Good morning and Merry Christmas-
Last week I upgraded our VB 4.1.8 on our Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS hosts (AMD Athlon 64x2, 2GB RAM, 32 bit ubuntu): 2 of our machines use Xerox 262i USB scanners. They were previously working great without any tweaks needed. They are now at 4.1.8 r75467 with Guest Additions installed at updated levels as well.
Now, I cannot get them(the scanners) to come up and be used. When I activate the USB button or click on the Devices tab at the top of VB, the scanner is shown there but is not recognized under Computer->Hardware->Device Manager. WinXP Device manager shows another USB root device that was previously not there.It is also not recognized by the scanning software (Xerox One Touch 4.0) which had been running flawlessly. I tried to reinstall, repair, make USB filter under settings- Nothing. No joy. Very confusing since it "seems" that the virtual machine can "see" the usb device but will not allow windows to access it despite that.
Does anyone have an idea? Failing that is there a way for me to "backlevel" to the previous working configuration?
This setup had been running for nearly a year without troubles other than the need to run /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup with linux kernal updates/upgrades.

Thanks,
Bob

Make sure you have install the Extension Pack that matches your version of VirtualBox, and double check that your users name is *still* in the vboxusers group on the host.

Note: if you had installed dkms (on the host as mentioned in your VirtualBox users manual) you would not need to run /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup on a kernel change.

Perryg,
Thanks for the reply. The users were "no longer" in vboxusers group; I added them back and the thing now works fine so many thanks!
Is this a known issue on upgrade between VB versions- ie. do I need to periodically check that the usergroup has not been "reset" or blanked out?
Also, I do have dkms installed on all machines but it seems that I end up having to run the setup script manually about 20-30% of the time there are upgrades with kernel changes- that has perplexed me for some time but since running the init.d script was trivial I have not really worried about it.

Again, thanks for the help and response!
Bob

I honestly don't know what removes the user name from the vboxusers group. It happens so rarely for me I have not been able to determine just who-what-or-where it happens.

Odd about the dkms issue though. I don't seem to have a problem and I run/test just about all Linux Distros that are available. Even some that do not have dkms native and I need to actually install from source.

Perry,
As best as I can see this happens when the kernel updates AND the Vbox updates are not dealt with in sequence ; ie if VBox updates after a kernel update then dkms does it's thing. If the kernel updates get installed after/before the next Vbox then it seems to require a manual setup via the .
Sitting here thinking about it, I guess that makes sense since there is no direct link other than when the Vbox update program uses dkms to keep things synchronized.
Bob