Sun VirtualBox

[MoonRise]

Same here!

[GreyGeek]

Join the club, SR. I've trashed a few myself. No good deed goes unpunished!

[SteveRiley]

For all I know, there may have been times where I gave advice that was incorrect and it messed up something on their system, too. ;-)

This is one of the few things makes me feel truly guilty...giving someone bad advice that trashes a system.

[ardvark71]

I corrected your post

Please don't worry, mistakes do happen and I certainly do not hold it against you in any way. I appreciated your help in getting things back to normal. :-) (high five smiley here)

For all I know, there may have been times where I gave advice that was incorrect and it messed up something on their system, too. ;-)

Regards...

[SecretCode]

I think we all learned something here tonight, I know I did: SecretCode can be dangerous...proceed with utmost caution! :-)

I corrected your post

[ardvark71]

First obtain root. Once you do this, then follow SecretCode's suggestion with the two usermod commands.

Hi Steve...

Thank you very much for the information you provided. I did get into recovery mode and executed the commands that SecretCode gave. Everything seems to be working right again. :-)

I think we all learned something here tonight, I know I did: Usermod can be dangerous...proceed with utmost caution! :-)

Regards...

[SteveRiley]

Currently, your supplementary group list shows only "virtualbox" because usermod -G removes a user account from all other supplementary groups. You need to manually re-create your group membership.

First obtain root. Once you do this, then follow SecretCode's suggestion with the two usermod commands.

[ardvark71]

Hi SecretCode....

The commands you gave did the trick, it seems to be fixed now! (whew, breathes a sigh of relief) ;-)

Thank you, guys, for your help! :-)

Regards...

[ardvark71]

Can you get to recovery mode from GRUB? That should enable you to sort out anything.

Let me give it a shot...

[SecretCode]

Can you get to recovery mode from GRUB? That should enable you to sort out anything.

[ardvark71]

What does groups output for you? For me it's

joe adm dialout cdrom plugdev lpadmin admin sambashare vboxusers

Hi guys...

It's, ok. SecretCode, no worries, mistakes happen. :-)

The output of "groups" is:

aaron@aaron:~$ groups
aaron vboxusers

Doesn't look very good at all. :-(

Regards...

[SecretCode]

I was sure I had copied that from an example on a web page ... yes, the -a option was necessary. Sorry :blush:

What does groups output for you? For me it's

joe adm dialout cdrom plugdev lpadmin admin sambashare vboxusers

If nothing else you can boot to a recovery mode console and type

usermod -g [I]yourusername[/I] [I]yourusername[/I]
usermod -a -G adm,dialout,cdrom,plugdev,lpadmin,admin,sambashare,vboxusers [I]yourusername[/I]

... and perhaps somebody else should check my syntax before you go ahead!

[SteveRiley]

This command should do the trick:

sudo usermod -G vboxusers yourusername

Note the capital G.

I just noticed that now I can't log in into anything requiring my password!!

I suspect it's because usermod is a more dangerous command to use for this. Read carefully the output from man usermod:

-G, --groups GROUP1[,GROUP2,...[,GROUPN]]]
    A list of supplementary groups which the user is also a member of. Each group is separated from the next
    by a comma, with no intervening whitespace. The groups are subject to the same restrictions as the group
    given with the -g option.

    [b]If the user is currently a member of a group which is not listed, the user will be removed from the group.[/b]
    This behaviour can be changed via the -a option, which appends the user to the current supplementary group
    list.

Note the part I highlighted in bold. The correct command would include the a option as well as the G:

sudo usermod -aG vboxusers [i]yourusername[/i]

An alternate mechanism is the adduser command. It's probably mentally safer to remember this one, because it works as expected and without any options:

NAME
       adduser, addgroup - add a user or group to the system

SYNOPSIS
       adduser [options] user group

   Add an existing user to an existing group
       If called with two non-option arguments, adduser will add an existing user to an existing group.

Now, we need to get your user account back to normal. Here's what my user account belongs to:

steve@x1:~$ [b]groups[/b]
steve adm cdrom sudo audio dip video plugdev lpadmin sambashare admin

If you can obtain root somehow, then you can reconstruct the group membership of your user account.

[ardvark71]

This command should do the trick:

sudo usermod -G vboxusers yourusername

Note the capital G.

You may need to restart after this. Or open a new shell or something.

Uh Secretcode....

I just noticed that now I can't log in into anything requiring my password!! It's not accepted. I get the following message when trying to start Synaptic, for example:

"Failed to run /usr/sbin/synaptic as user root.

The underlying authorization mechanism (sudo) does not allow you to run this program. Contact the system administrator."

How do I go about fixing this?!

Regards...

[MoonRise]

"Ever seen LD VMotion and Storage VMotion work?"

Can't say I have. We've always been a small shop but recently we've seen huge growth to the point of reaccesing our systems. VM is an eventual path. I've already virtualized lesser systems as they were easier to move. The others will have to wait until the next time we do an upgrade which won't be for a while so we have time to "plan".