Multi-User VirtualBox/Vagrant setup

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patchMan
Posts: 1
Joined: 10. May 2013, 04:22

Multi-User VirtualBox/Vagrant setup

Post by patchMan »

hey guys. I am really hoping somebody can offer some insight here, I am starting to pull my hair out. I have been using vbox/vagrant for a few months and really enjoy the setup - I can create vm environments on my local machine to try out new distros and separate out my work and it is really quick and easy. However, at my organization we provisioned a host that we were going to use vbox/vagrant on for doing testing without having to worry about messing things up because we could just spin up a new vbox/vagrant instance. Here is where it all goes wrong:

I installed virtualbox as the root user on this host. I installed vagrant using rubygems. I need this to work in such a way that every user can create their own vagrant boxes and ssh into them whenever they want. I don't need cross usage though, user A doesn't need to be able to get into user B's machine. But user A and B both need to be able to do the whole 'vagrant box add, vagrant init, vagrant up, vagrant ssh, vagrant halt, etc etc etc'.

The problem I am having is that whatever user I have first create a vm (and it works perfectly for them), no other user can subsequently create a vm because it the first users vm ended up creating files that they own and cannot be modified by other users. I am at a loss. I have my users all part of the vboxusers group. This is getting very frustrating. I cannot find a single tutorial online about how to do a multi-user vagrant/vbox install, so these permissions are killing me.

What do you guys suggest? let me know what other information you need from me to help diagnose this.

thanks
noteirak
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Joined: 13. Jan 2012, 11:14
Primary OS: Debian other
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Re: Multi-User VirtualBox/Vagrant setup

Post by noteirak »

Moved to "Using Virtualbox".

Virtualbox was not design for multi-user access on a single VM, and will actually always reset the VM permissions to the user's one. This is by design and nothing can be done against it.
If you need multi-user access to VMs, Virtualbox is not the tool you need (at least for now).
Hyperbox - Virtual Infrastructure Manager - https://apps.kamax.lu/hyperbox/
Manage your VirtualBox infrastructure the free way!
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