[CentOS] VirtualBox and CentOS

Tue Dec 8 16:20:05 UTC 2009
Max Hetrick <maxhetrick at verizon.net>

Lars Hecking wrote:
>  I recently doownloaded and installed the latest RHEL5 rpm from the VirtualBox
>  web site. While it generally works very well, I have been unable to get USB
>  access to work on the guest.
> 
>  This seems to be a very common problem. Many references to it turn up in a
>  web search, but I have not found a solution that works on CentOS 5. I got no
>  response on the vbox-users mailing list either. Can anyone here help?
> 
>  Among the things I tried were various /sys and /proc/bus/usb related fstab
>  and rc.sysinit changes. Drew a total blank on this one ...

I have had the same problem. The only thing that I've found to work is this:

Get your vboxusers group ID
# cat /etc/group | vboxusers

Remount the USBFS with your vboxusers GID
# mount -t usbfs -o remount,devgid=GID,devmode=664 /proc/bus/usb 
/proc/bus/usb

Change the permissions on /dev/vboxdrv
# chmod g+rw /dev/vboxdrv

Restart the vboxdrv service
# service vboxdrv restart

Now when you boot your VM up the USB devices aren't greyed out any 
longer. I suppose you could script this if you wanted, add the usbfs 
mount to /etc/fstab and have the chmod go in a startup script or something.

Regards,
Max