Home / server / Questions / 1051118
In Process
onemarcfifty
Asked: 2021-01-26 05:59:35 +0800 CST

How to remote access Virtualbox on a headless linux server

  • 772

This is not a real question but I rather want to put this here in order to document it as there is a lot of contradicting information in the web.

When you run Virtualbox on a headless linux server, then there are afaik at least two native options (i.e. not RDP/VNC/X) to access Virtualbox remotely. One is phpvirtualbox and the other one is remotebox. Either of these solutions needs the virtual box web services.

Running the Virtualbox Web services as a root user is not a good option for security reasons. Many of the solutions which are suggested in the web are either outdated as they talk about changing the /etc/config/defaults files - but this is not relevant for systemd any more, just initd.

Other solutions only cover parts of the steps and fail for example with access rights to PAM or to the PID file.

linux virtualbox remote-access virtual-machines

1 Answers

  1. We need to address the following steps:

    1. create a non-root user to run the vbox-web service
    2. add the user to the right groups for Virtualbox and PAM
    3. modify the systemd unit file, w/r to the executable, the user and the location of the pidfile

    create a user

    Create a non-root user, with a home directory and no login capabilities

    adduser --home /home/virtual --shell /bin/false --ingroup vboxusers --disabled-password--disabled-login virtual

    Add the user to the shadow group

    The user's primary group needs to be vboxusers. In order to allow the web services to authenticate against PAM it can - at least on debian systems such as debian, ubuntu or mint, be made a member of the shadow group.

    usermod -a -G shadow virtual

    modify the systemd unit file

    The unit file needs to have the following content:

    [Unit]
Description=Virtual Box Web Service
After=network.target


[Service]
Type=forking
User=virtual
Group=vboxusers
ExecStart=/usr/bin/vboxwebsrv --pidfile /home/virtual/vboxweb.pid --host=0.0.0.0 --background
PIDFile=/home/virtual/vboxweb.pid


[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

    So rather than calling the start batch script, we call the executable directly. The options indicate the location of the pidfile as well as the interface it binds to (in the example this is 0.0.0.0, so any interface).

    This video on youtube describes all necessary steps in detail.

    • 0