VirtualBox Guest Additions

Questions about the installation of FreeBSD
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adripillo12
Posts: 52
Joined: Wed Sep 25, 2013 7:04 am

Re: VirtualBox Guest Additions

Post by adripillo12 »

mechanic wrote:
adripillo12 wrote:
Could you please put the full command line that you are using?
Sure:

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# mount_smbfs -I 192.168.56.1  //user@RASPBERRY/sharing /mnt/shares
plus the obvious variations like changing the case of the netbios name, leaving out the username, missing out or providing the password on demand...
Are you sure you have the correct route to the share? Try

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showmount -e IP
where IP is the IP of the server you want to mount.
kraileth
Posts: 312
Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2016 12:30 pm

Re: VirtualBox Guest Additions

Post by kraileth »

Before you all continue to investigate it: Can anybody confirm that it does work at all? As far as I know it used to work but shared folder functionality broke during the painful transition to Virtualbox 5. Since then shares were broken and disabled by tools such as Vagrant (i.e. it's a well-known problem).

Somebody was working on fixing it and making progress along the way as mentioned in BSDNow! some month ago if my memory does not fail me. I've been waiting for this functionality to become usable again, too, but I haven't heard of the issues having been resolved. I might have missed it, but chances are that it's simply not possible to use shares with a FreeBSD-based guest for the moment (it works fine with Linux/Windows guests on FreeBSD, though).
mechanic
Posts: 23
Joined: Sun Dec 13, 2015 12:54 pm

Re: VirtualBox Guest Additions

Post by mechanic »

Thanks for that info, kraileth. Pity that this kind of thing is not better described and updated regularly in the docs. Getting GhostBSD running in a virtual machine is just too much hassle for me I'm afraid, I have better things to do. Surprising that these things do not have more focus, as I would think most BSD servers are run virtually on large machines. Thanks for everyone who helped though!
ASX
Posts: 988
Joined: Wed May 06, 2015 12:46 pm

Re: VirtualBox Guest Additions

Post by ASX »

kraileth wrote:... but I haven't heard of the issues having been resolved. I might have missed it, but chances are that it's simply not possible to use shares with a FreeBSD-based guest for the moment (it works fine with Linux/Windows guests on FreeBSD, though).
I'm a bit perplexed ... it is true that the "integtated" shared folders functionality might be broken in some way, yet it is still possible to use the classic "samba" approach, and as long as your guest is properly configured in the (virtual) network, it must work. Admittely this will require some work to configure the things.
kraileth
Posts: 312
Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2016 12:30 pm

Re: VirtualBox Guest Additions

Post by kraileth »

mechanic wrote:Thanks for that info, kraileth. Pity that this kind of thing is not better described and updated regularly in the docs.
As far as I know it's a single developer working (in his free time) on that shared folder problem, trying to fix issues with 5.x's virtual filesystem and FreeBSD. The last thing that I heard was that he got it working read-only. If you follow the history of the port here, you can see that since version 5.x was introduced, a year ago, it was updated frequently (at least once a month, sometimes four or five times a month). Keeping VirtualBox running on FreeBSD at all is a gigantic task. Making everything work smoothly obviously is not possible with the little resources that there are.
Getting GhostBSD running in a virtual machine is just too much hassle for me I'm afraid, I have better things to do. Surprising that these things do not have more focus, as I would think most BSD servers are run virtually on large machines.
The problem here is the combination of FreeBSD and VirtualBox. Yes, there are a lot of FreeBSD instances out on Cloud platforms like AWS, Digital Ocean or even Microsoft's Azure, doing very important work. Companies like Microsoft are paying employees to make sure that FreeBSD works well on Hpyer-V. It's just Oracle that does not care about FreeBSD a lot...

And when it comes to the guest support, again, VirtualBox is the problem. FreeBSD grew its own modern Hypervisor (called Bhyve) which attracted a lot of developer's attention and drew even more resources off from VirtualBox. So as far as FreeBSD is concerned, you've probably unfortunately picked the least well supported Hypervisor. :|
ASX wrote:
kraileth wrote:... but I haven't heard of the issues having been resolved. I might have missed it, but chances are that it's simply not possible to use shares with a FreeBSD-based guest for the moment (it works fine with Linux/Windows guests on FreeBSD, though).
I'm a bit perplexed ... it is true that the "integtated" shared folders functionality might be broken in some way, yet it is still possible to use the classic "samba" approach, and as long as your guest is properly configured in the (virtual) network, it must work. Admittely this will require some work to configure the things.
Most likely, yes. But Windows as host, Virtualbox's internal NATing AND Samba is a combination that doesn't exactly sound like fun. I would imagine that there are thousand things that could go wrong. Perhaps Virtualbox's bridged mode could make that easier? But since I haven't had a copy of Windows on real hardware for ages and know next to nothing about configuring Samba, I can't say for sure.
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