sudo -u username vboxmanage - global settings dir not accessible

[mongole]

Hi,
I have set up a Ubuntu 16.04 host with a 16.04 client, which has it's disks as LVM partitions. I encrypted them and I wrote a script to start the VM and to enter the decryption password. This works fine, as log as I am calling the script as the main user. As the systemd service handling is run as root, I need to be able to run the script as root.

But when I call the script as root with sudo, I get following error:

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VBoxManage: error: Failed to initialize COM because the global settings directory '/root/.config/VirtualBox' is not accessible!

The directory exists, and there are a lot of files and logfiles in there.

Of course I tried to start it as the main user with sudo, it fails with the same error:

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sudo -u andi bash -c "cd /home/andi/opt/VBoxManage; ./start-encrypted-vm.sh"

Error:

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...
VBoxManage: error: Failed to initialize COM because the global settings directory '/root/.config/VirtualBox' is not accessible!
...

It seems the VBoxManage is still run as root, why else would it like to access the /root/.config/VirtualBox directory and not the also existing /home/andi/.config/VirtualBox directory?

[mebarton]

The problem is not vboxmanage but the sudo env i.e. $HOME is still set to /root. I had the same problem with ubuntu MATE 18.04.

The following should work it did for me.

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export HOME="home/andi"
sudo -u andi bash -c "cd /home/andi/opt/VBoxManage; ./start-encrypted-vm.sh"
export HOME="root"

or you can play about with visudo and change "Defaults env_reset" and it options.
Read the man page before doing this as some company admins will have a problem with this being changed.