vboxusers group disappeared after last update

[mau17]

Hi,

I recently upgraded to VirtualBox 5.1.8 r111374 (Qt5.6.1) from the previous version, on my Ubuntu 14.04 host. The guest is Windows 7. I also have the proper guest addition and extension pack.

After this upgrade VirtualBox can't detect any USB flash drives connected to my computer. After digging into this a bit, I realized that the vboxusers group has disappeared from my computer! I tried reinstalling the extension pack but had no luck.

Everything else seems to be working fine.

[Frank Mehnert]

Which package are you using? Is that the Ubuntu 14.04 package from the repository the Oracle download page? Did you only upgrade VirtualBox or did you also update other packages? I'm not aware of any instruction in the package installation script which would remove that group. There is only groupadd -r -f vboxusers which creates that group as 'system group' but which doesn't remove that group. In particular there is no groupdel in any script. On Ubuntu/Debian we are using addgroup --system vboxusers. Again, nowhere any sign that we remove any group.

[mau17]

This is the repository I upgrade from:

deb ​http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian trusty contrib

I probably also upgraded other packages. Maybe what happened is that I was doing a clean install of virtualbox (I nave to do that every now and then) and this particular version failed to create the group.

Anyhow, I just upgraded to the newly released 5.1.10 r112026 (Qt5.6.1). This installation did create the vboxusers group-- however my user was not added to it (the group had no users).

I simply added my user to the group and everything is working fine now.

I know this is easy to fix for users, by typing a couple of commands, but I thought you might want to know.

Thanks

[Frank Mehnert]

Adding the user to that group cannot be done by the installer script. It's the job of the admin (i.e. the person who installs VirtualBox) to decide which users have direct access to USB devices and therefore should be member of the vboxusers group.

The subject of this ticket is that the vboxusers group somehow magically disappeared. I still don't know how this can happen -- and I'm not aware of any similar report.