Sharing folders between VirtualBox host and guest machines

This post is the 4th installment of the VirtualBox series. The focus is on how to share folders between the host and the guest OSes. Part 1 of the series shows how to install VirtualBox on a Debian host, and how to create a FreeBSD virtual machine. Part 2 outlines the post installation tasks, including installing the universal VirtualBox extension pack. Part 3 shows how the guest OS can access USB drives mounted on the host.
The method outlined in this blog post works for Linux and Windows guest OSes but not FreeBSD. You can set up NFS or Samba to share a folder between a Linux host and a FreeBSD guest.

Prerequisites

To share a folder using the following procedure, the OS-specific guest additions package must be pre-installed. Part 1 of this series includes instructions for installing the guest additions package for the FreeBSD guest OS.

Procedure

1. Declare the shared folder on host OS.
   Open the Oracle VM VirtualBox manager on your host machine, select the target guest OS, and click Settings. Note that your guest machine does NOT need to be powered off.
   
2. Select Shared Holders, and click the Plus button to add a shared folder. Note that you can have more than 1 shared folder.
   
3. Specify the path for the shared folder.
   Click the down arrow next to the Folder Path parameter, select Other, and navigate to the target shared folder.
   
4. Configure the shared folder.
   The Folder name field refers to the folder name on the guest OS, which defaults to the folder name you specified in the last step. You should note the folder name in order to identify the full folder pathname on the guest OS. For example, if the shared folder on the host machine is /home/peter/Music, the corresponding folder name defaults to /media/sf_Music on the Ubuntu guest OS, and \\vboxsvr\Music on the Windows guest OS.
   
   The Auto-mount checkbox should be enabled. Optionally, you can also mount the folder manually, but then you must modify access permissions in order to make the folder writable by non-root users.
   
   Unless the shared folder is for one-off use only, you should enable the Make Permanent checkbox.
5. Power recycle the guest machine.
6. Grant folder access permission to non-root users.
   This step only applies to Linux guest OS(not Windows). Login to the guest OS, and add regular users to the vboxsf group using the following command.
   
   sudo usermod -aG vboxsf <someuserID>

Related posts

• Part 1 of VirtualBox series - on installation.
• Part 2 - post-installation.
• Part 3 - mounting of USB drives.

Ubuntu: how to reset lost administrative password

After an extended vacation, I came home to discover to my horror that I could no longer login to my seldom-used Ubuntu laptop. The reason was embarrassingly simple: I forgot my password. My muscle memory (or finger memory) did not help while I was frantically typing my usual passwords but to no avail. I own the administrative account on that system. So, I had no one else to turn to for help. Luckily, I was able to login another machine and google how to reset the administrative password on Ubuntu.

Prerequisites

There are 2 preconditions for using the procedure to reset the administrative password.

1. Physical access to machine.
   You need to access the system console in order to interrupt loading of the OS.
2. The root password was disabled.
   By default, Ubuntu disables the password of the root account by assigning it a value which cannot possibly match any encrypted value. During the installation of Ubuntu, you were asked to create the first user. That initial user, by default, belongs to the sudo group which means that the user can be elevated to perform system administration functions. The administrative password which we are going to reset refers to the password of the initial user.
   The procedure assumes that you did not manually assign root a valid password. If root has a valid password and you know it, then you can simply sign on as root and reset the administrative password using the password command. If the root password was also forgotten, this procedure does not apply because you need to enter that password to drop to root shell prompt in this procedure.

How to reset administrative password

1. Power recycle.
   After the BIOS screen appears, press down the left shift key to enter GRUB. This step can be quite finicky, and you may need to repeat it several times until you get the timing just right.
   
2. Scroll down to Advanced options for Ubuntu, and press Enter.
   
3. In the ensuing screen, scroll down to the top Recovery mode line, and press Enter.
   If the Linux kernel image had been upgraded on the machine before, you would see multiple recover mode lines on the screen. Select the recovery mode line that corresponds to the latest Linux image(that is nearest to the top).
   
4. In the Recovery Menu screen, scroll down to root, and press Enter.
   
5. Press Enter again.
   If you have previously assigned root a password, you would be prompted to enter it at this step. Otherwise, just press Enter to continue.
   
6. Remount filesystem.
   After all the hard work, you are now at the root shell prompt. The filesystem at this point is read-only. Remount the file system to add write permission.

   # mount -o rw,remount /
   

7. Reset administrative password.
   Use the passwd command to change the password for the administrative user.

   # passwd <adminuser>
   

   Press Control-D to return to the recovery menu.
   
8. Select resume.
   
9. Exit recovery.
   Press OK to exit recovery mode and continue booting.

How to mount USB drives on VirtualBox

This is part 3 of the 4-part series on VirtualBox. This post shows you how to access, from your guest OS, a flash drive mounted on the Debian host. Parts 1, 2 and 4 demonstrate how to build a FreeBSD virtual machine using VirtualBox on a Debian host, perform post-installation tasks, and share folders.

Prerequisites

The VirtualBox extension pack must be installed on the VirtualBox host. See part 2 for instructions.

Configuring USB

Follow the steps below to configure VirtualBox USB.

1. Add user to vboxusers group.
   VirtualBox access to the host's USB drives is only granted to users of the vboxusers group. As root on the host, run the following command to add each VirtualBox user (e.g., peter) to the group.

    # usermod -aG vboxusers peter
   

2. Power off VM.
   VirtualBox defaults to using USB Controller 1.1 (OHCI). Modern hardware uses USB Controller 2.0(EHCI) and USB Controller 3.0(xHCI). Before you can change the USB controller protocol, the virtual machine must be powered off.
3. Open VirtualBox Manager, click Settings, and select USB.

4. Specify USB Controller.
   Select either USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller or USB 3.0 (xHCI) Controller according to your actual hardware.
   
   Note that you can add USB Device Filters to define the types of USB drives which will be automatically made visible to the guest OS. Be forewarned that the USB drive, once made visible to the guest OS, will no longer be available to the host. More on the use of device filters in the next section.

Accessing USB drive

Below is the step-by-step procedure to mount and access a flash drive.

1. Insert the flash drive into your host machine's USB port.
2. Unmount the flash drive (if it is auto-mounted on your host).
   Making it available to the guest will automatically and instantly unmount it from the host. To avoid any data loss due to pending writes to the drive, it is a good practice to explicitly unmount the drive prior to handing control to the guest.
3. Power on the FreeBSD guest.
4. Assign USB drive to guest OS.
   
   Open the virtual system console, and right click the USB drive icon.
   
   Click to select your USB drive.
   
   Note that this is a 1-time assignment only. Please see instructions at the end of the section on how to automatically assign this particular USB drive for all subsequent sessions.
5. Login to FreeBSD, and mount the drive.
   You can mount a MS-DOS based flash drive by running the following commands as root. Replace /dev/da0s1 with the proper device identifier for your USB drive. (You can find out the exact device ID by first running dmesg to identify the device name, e.g. da0, and fdisk to reveal the disk partition structure, e.g., s1.)

    # mkdir -p  /media/usb
    # mount -t msdosfs  /dev/da0s1  /media/usb
   

   To unmount the drive,

    # umount /media/usb
   

To always automatically assign a particular USB drive to the guest OS, open the VirtualBox Manager, click Settings, and then USB.

Finally, click Add USB device filter (with the + sign) icon, and select the USB drive that is currently inserted in the host.

Related posts

• Part 1 of VirtualBox series - on installation.
• Part 2 - post-installation.
• Part 4 - on sharing folders.

What to do after installing VirtualBox

This post is part 2 of the 4-part series on creating a virtual machine using VirtualBox hosted on a Debian machine. Part 1 focuses on the installation of VirtualBox and the guest OS (FreeBSD). Part 2 addresses things that you should do after installing VirtualBox. Lastly, parts 3 and 4 deals specifically with accessing USB flash drives from the guest OS, and sharing folders.

Install extension pack

The base VirtualBox package is missing some important functionalities: support for virtual USB 2.0 and 3.0 devices, host webcam passthrough, Intel PXE boot, and disk image encryption. To obtain those functionalities, you need to download and install the VirtualBox extension pack.

Note that the extension pack operates under a much stricter license than the GPLv2 of the base VirtualBox package. Specifically, the VirtualBox Extension Pack Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL) 'is a free license for personal, educational or evaluation use'. For commercial use, you do have to pay a fee to Oracle.

The procedure to install the extension pack is as follows:

1. Download the VirtualBox extension pack to your host machine.
   
   The extension pack is available from the VirtualBox website. The package is universal for all host and guest OSes. However, you should use the same version for both the base and extension pack. In other words, when you upgrade your base, you should also upgrade the extension pack.
2. Run VirtualBox Manager.

3. Add extension pack.
   
   From the File menu, click Preferences. Then, select Extensions in the side panel.

Click the + icon to specify the location of the extension pack file (Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.2.4-119785.vbox-extpack).

At the end, click Install. Before it begins installation, you will be prompted to accept the software license, and to enter the administrative password.

Bridge host & guest networks

By default, the virtual machine is NATed (not bridged) to your host network. Consequently, the FreeBSD guest is on a different subnet than the host. For example, my FreeBSD guest has a 10.0.0.2 IP address while my Linux host has a 192.168.1.49 IP address. Practically, it means that I cannot ssh to the guest OS from anywhere in my host network. To make that possible, I need to bridge the host network and the guest. The procedure is below (the VM does not have to be powered off for you to change networking).

1. Open the VirtualBox Manager, and click Settings.
2. Click Network in the side menu.

3. Select Bridged Adapter in the Attached to dropdown menu.

Enable copy & paste between host & guest

I administer the FreeBSD guest extensively from its virtual system console running on the Linux host. By default, the clipboard is not shared between the host and the guest systems. That means I often need to manually re-enter commands on the guest OS rather than copy and paste from the host. To share the system clipboard (and save yourself plenty of laborious typing), follow the steps below:

1. Open the VirtualBox Manager, and click Settings.
2. Select General, and click the Advanced tab.

3. Select bidirectional for both Shared Clipboard and Drag and Drop.

Note that, to share the clipboard, the FreeBSD-specific guest additions package (emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions) must also be installed. The instruction for that is already detailed in the Post-installation section of part 1 of this series.

Related posts

• Part 1 of VirtualBox series.
• Part 3 - on mounting USB drives.
• Part 4 - on sharing folders.

axi-cache: a new search tool for Debian packages

Debian has no shortage of tools when it comes to searching for packages. Revered oldtimers include apt-cache, apt, and apt-file. axi-cache is the new kid on the block. This post explains what is novel about axi-cache and how to use it.

First, axi-cache needs to be installed and initialized as follows:

# apt-get install apt-xapian-index
# update-apt-xapian-index
The index /var/lib/apt-xapian-index is up to date

The basic axi-cache search is syntactically very similar with the aforementioned search commands:

$ axi-cache search browser
930 results found.
Results 1-20:
100% chromium-driver - web browser - WebDriver support
99% chromium - web browser
99% ruby-browser - browser detection for Ruby
97% libwwwbrowser-perl - Platform independent means to start a WWW browser
96% libhtml-display-perl - module for displaying HTML locally in a browser
96% gcu-plugin - GNOME chemistry utils (browser plugin)
96% python-zope.browser - Shared Zope Toolkit browser components
96% python3-zope.browser - Shared Zope Toolkit browser components
96% chromedriver - web browser - WebDriver support transitional package
96% mythbrowser - Small web browser module for MythTV
96% chromium-widevine - web browser - widevine content decryption support
96% swfdec-mozilla - dummy package for transition to browser-plugin-gnash
95% python-livereload - automatic browser refresher
95% mozilla-plugin-gnash - dummy package for renaming to browser-plugin-gnash
95% python3-livereload - automatic browser refresher (Python 3)
95% qupzilla - lightweight web browser based on libqtwebkit
95% python-livereload-doc - automatic browser refresher (documentation)
95% firefox-esr - Mozilla Firefox web browser - Extended Support Release (ESR)
95% ipig - integrating PSMs into genome browser visualisations
94% epiphany-browser-data - Data files for the GNOME web browser
More terms: refresher livereload safer stable refresh browsing webdriver
More tags: field::religion culture::dutch uitoolkit::gtk field::chemistry use::browsing web::browser interface::x11
`axi-cache more' will give more results

A similar search using apt-cache returns 962 results with the top 20 results being:

389-admin - 389 Directory Administration Server
libds-admin-serv0 - Libraries for the 389 Directory Administration Server
xul-ext-adblock-plus - advertisement blocking extension for web browsers
ajaxterm - Web based terminal written in Python
alevt - X11 Teletext/Videotext browser
alice - Web browser (WebKit or Gecko) based IRC client
xul-ext-all-in-one-sidebar - sidebar extension for Firefox
node-almond - minimal AMD API implementation for use in optimized browser builds
pilot - Simple file browser from Alpine, a text-based email client
ams - Realtime modular synthesizer for ALSA
amule-gnome-support - ed2k links handling support for GNOME web browsers
libjs-angularjs - lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser
libjs-animate.css - cross-browser library of CSS animations
libapache2-mod-upload-progress - upload progress support for the Apache web server
apachedex - Compute APDEX from Apache-style logs
xfonts-kapl - APL fonts for A+ development
artemis - genome browser and annotation tool
libjs-asciimathml - Library to render high quality mathematical formulas in a browser
aspectj - aspect-oriented extension for Java - tools
auctex - integrated document editing environment for TeX etc.


Note that, unlike apt-cache, axi-cache returns, by default, only the top 20 hits. You can see the entire result set by specifying the --all option (e.g., axi-cache --all search browser). Alternatively, you can page through the results by running the following command after the initial search.

$ axi-cache more

In general, axi-cache returns more relevant results than apt-cache. The latter implements a rudimentary grep-like search by matching regular-expression text patterns against the package name and description of a package. Unless you have some idea of the package's name, an apt-cache search often returns many irrelevant results, as indicated by the above example. In contrast, axi-cache can rank the search results by relevance with the help of the Apt Xapian Index(axi). This index is a database of package meta-data which includes much more than just a package's name and description. To examine what is indexed, run the following command:

$ axi-cache info
...<snipped>...
Plugin status:
aliases enabled, up to date (430 days, 15:47:18.356149 older than index)
app-install disabled
apttags enabled, needs indexing (6 days, 23:59:10.729973 newer than index)
cataloged_time enabled, needs indexing (6 days, 23:59:10.729973 newer than index)
debtags disabled
descriptions enabled, needs indexing (6 days, 23:59:10.729973 newer than index)
relations enabled, needs indexing (6 days, 23:59:10.729973 newer than index)
sections enabled, needs indexing (6 days, 23:59:10.729973 newer than index)
sizes enabled, needs indexing (6 days, 23:59:10.729973 newer than index)
template enabled, up to date
translated-desc enabled, needs indexing (1 day, 10:56:58.643851 newer than index)
...<snipped>...

As an aside, you can update the Apt Xapian Index by executing the following command as root:

# update-apt-xapian-index

The most distinctive feature of the index is its use of tags (apttags). These tags categorize a package by predefined facets such as role, protocol, suite, culture, use, works-with, etc.

Suppose you are multi-lingual and you are looking for packages that install, say, Chinese fonts. You can quickly identify the packages you need using the following command.

$ axi-cache search x11::font and culture::chinese and role::data
13 results found.
Results 1-13:
100% fonts-arphic-bkai00mp - "AR PL KaitiM Big5" Chinese TrueType font by Arphic Technology
100% fonts-arphic-bsmi00lp - "AR PL Mingti2L Big5" Chinese TrueType font by Arphic Technology
100% fonts-arphic-gbsn00lp - "AR PL SungtiL GB" Chinese TrueType font by Arphic Technology
100% fonts-arphic-gkai00mp - "AR PL KaitiM GB" Chinese TrueType font by Arphic Technology
100% fonts-cwtex-fs - TrueType Font from cwTeX - FangSong
100% fonts-cwtex-heib - TrueType Font from cwTeX - HeiBold
100% fonts-cwtex-kai - TrueType Font from cwTeX - Kai
100% fonts-cwtex-ming - TrueType Font from cwTeX - Ming
100% fonts-cwtex-yen - TrueType Font from cwTeX - Yen
100% ttf-wqy-zenhei - transitional dummy package
100% xfonts-intl-chinese - international fonts for X - Chinese
100% xfonts-intl-chinese-big - international fonts for X - large Chinese
100% xfonts-unifont - PCF (bitmap) version of GNU Unifont
More terms: chinese fonts truetype cwtex font koanughi cwttf
More tags: made-of::font culture::taiwanese role::dummy role::app-data culture::greek culture::korean culture::russian

Note that axi-cache supports logical operations such as AND, OR, and NOT.

The following table compiles a non-exhaustive list of common facets and example values. For a complete list, please click here. To make a tag, join the facet and the value using 2 colons, e.g., role::program.

Facet	Values
admin	filesystem, forensics, monitoring, power-management, virtualization
culture	chinese, latvian, russian
field	arts, astronomy, finance, mathematics, medicine, statistics
game	arcade, board, card, fps, mud, puzzle, rpg, sport, toys, typing
implemented-in	c, php
interface	3d, commandline, graphical, shell, x11
network	client, configuration, server, service, vpn
office	finance, groupware, presentation, spreadsheet
protocol	ip, ipv6, smtp, webdav
role	app-data, data, debug-symbols, devel-lib, documentation, kernel, metapackage, plugin, program, shared-lib, source
security	antivirus, authentication, cryptography, log-analyzer
suite	bsd, debian, eclipse, emacs, gnome, gnu, kde, mozilla, mysql, openoffice, openstack, postgresql, xfce, xmms2
system	cloud, embedded, laptop, mobile, server, virtual
uitoolkit	gtk, motif, ncurses, qt, sdl, tk, xlib
use	analysing, browsing, calculating, chatting, checking, compressing, configuring, converting, downloading, driver, editing, entertaining, filtering, gameplaying, learning, login, measuring, monitor, organizing, playing, printing, routing, scanning, searching, simulating, storing, synchronizing, transmission, typesetting, viewing
works-with	archive, audio, calendar, db, file, font, image, logfile, mail, network-traffic, spreadsheet, text, unicode, video
x11	font, screensaver, theme, window-manager

In closing, axi-cache is a good search tool for Debian packages because it usually gives you more relevant results. One caveat is warranted, however. Not all Debian packages have tags defined, which is particularly true for packages that are downloaded from third-party non-standard repositories.