guest addition functions degrade with guest runtime

[PinkyBrain]

Hi!

Sorry, but this is going to be a bit vague and probably hard to reproduce, but has happened to me various times, so I guess it is a bug.

I'm running VirtualBox 4.1.8 on Win7 (64 bit). I know this isn't he current version, but I cannot update the setup now and the release notes of newer versions don't indicate a fix to my problem.

Guest OS is Ubuntu 11.4, but I had the same problems with previous versions of Ubuntu too. There's one shared folder ("Temp") in the VM mounted via fstab:

Temp		/media/Temp	vboxsf	rw,uid=1000,gid=1000	0	0

Right after starting the VM almost everything works (bidirectional clipboard, access to files in the shared folder). But even then only root may write to the shared folder, normal users get

cp: cannot create regular file `/media/Temp/foo': Permission denied

To keep my working state I take a snapshot from time to time and reset the VM to the last snapshot instead of a shutdown. So the VM runtime is can get quite long (several weeks or month).

After some time clipboard sharing stops to work completely - guest and host use seperate clipboards.

Later the shared folder also degrades and I cannot write files inside the host anymore, even as root I get an error stating that a file of the same name already exists although it doesn't.

A restart of the VM fixes all the strange effects .. for a while. It seems the restart also fixes at least the shared folder issues of a loaded snapshot too!?

[jens]

I can confirm that clipboard stops to work after some time with 4.1.20-80170-Win (Guest OS: Lubuntu 12.04.1 with 3.2.0-30-generic kernel)

I didn't use a vboxfs share.

[SlankySloop]

The clipboard part is still valid for VirtualBox 4.2.4-81684 (Host: Win7-64Bit; Guest: Ubuntu 11.4). VBox is configured to use birectional clipboard, but after some time shared clipboard won't work anymore. No problems with shared folders for me.

[gerardo.lisboa]

This situation also occurs on 5.0.6. with Windows host and guest.

Restarting the VM (stop and then start - not pause/unpause or save/restore) solves the problem temporarily.

Verified with Shared Folders and Shared Clipboard.