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Igor Zinov'yev
Asked: 2012-12-15 06:40:31 +0800 CST

How do I permanently change owner and group of a system device?

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I am using a separate HDD as a disk for my Virtualbox machine. I have made a vmdk using the tutorial provided in the VirtualBox manual, but in order for the machine to run I have to constantly change the owner and group of the /dev/sdb device to the user I am logged in with.

Time after time permissions get reset back to root:disk, and I'm not certain when exactly that happens. What can I do to change the owner and group permanently or maybe to not have to do it at all?

virtualbox

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The probably simplest and best way to fix the problem is adding your user to disk group.

    sudo adduser %user disk

    Then logoff and login back, you should able to interact with hard drive from Virtualbox.

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  2. This overriding behavior you see is udev daemon, the system service which maintains those device files. It acts at boot time and whenever a device is added or removed.

    To configure permissions for that disk so VirtualBox users can have raw access to it, you have to create a rule for udev in a file under /etc/udev/rules.d/. In your particular case, assuming your user is part of vboxusers group, that can be accomplished with a command like this:

    $ echo 'ENV{DEVNAME}=="/dev/sdb" GROUP="vboxusers"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/92-sdb-permissions.rules
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