Tag Archives: VirtualBox

VirtualBox 6: How to enable symlinks for shared folders

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For security reasons, creating symbolic links in a shared folder is disabled in the guest OS (ticket 10085 and manual 5.3 Shared Folders). If you trust your Linux guest OS, you can enable symlinking from the host OS with the following command:

~ $ VBoxManage setextradata "VM_Name" VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/Folder_Name 1

Replace VM_Name and Folder_Name with your own names. To get a list of names of your virtual machines, execute in the host console:

~ $ VBoxManage list vms

You can also list information about a specific machine with:

~ $ VBoxManage showvminfo "VM_Name"

Now you can start your Linux guest OS and create the symbolic link, in my case  I wanted to point my shared folder to the apache directory /var/www/html, e.g.

~ $ sudo ln -s /media/sf_Websites /var/www/html

Apache serves cached files with garbled text at end

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When using Apache running on a VirtualBox machine with a shared folder, small files such as JavaScript or CSS files might not get updated from the host and served with additional characters at the end. This happens because of a bug in VirtualBox when Apache is using sendfile to improve data transfer. Just turn the EnabeSendfile Directive off in your httpd.conf, e.g.:

EnableSendfile off

How to automount your virtualbox shared folder to /var/www

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After adding the shared folder Websites to fstab by adding the line

Websites /var/www vboxsf rw,uid=33,gid=33 0 0

and giving the right permissions, I always got the following error during my virtual Linux Mint boot:

keys:Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery

All I had to do was add vboxsf on a line of its own in /etc/modules.
Solution found on askubuntu.com