Access physical device as non-root user

[skoehler]

Hi,

I've VMware Workstation 6.5 on OpenSuSE 11 and everything seems to work fine.

I created a Virtual machine with 2 HD:

- Virtual 8 GB which hosts a NetWare DOS and SYS partition

- Physical (this is /dev/sdb) which hosts all other NetWare Voumes

As root-User I can start the virtual machine without any problems, but as non-root user I have problems to access the physical disk.I chown all the virtual files to my user account, but still it is not possible. It seems like the OpenSuSE is denying access to the /dev/sdb device to the non-root user.

Does anybody know how I need to configure VMware or OpenSuSE to be able to access the physical device as non-root user?

Thank you in advance

Steffen

[RDPetruska]

I believe your user needs rights to the "disk" device class.

[KevinG]

On most distributions, the physical devices, such as /dev/hda (IDE physical disk) and /dev/sdb (SCSI physical disk) belong to group-id

disk. If this is the case, you can add VMware Workstation users to the disk group.

[skoehler]

Indeed, the owner of /dev/sdb is root:disk.

I made my user member of disk, but still I receive the error

• when starting the VM:

• File not found: physical-sdb.vmdk. This file is required to power on this virtual machine. If this file was moved, please provide its new location.

• when editing the VM:

• File not found: physical-sdb.vmdk: This file is required to power on this virtual machine. If this file was moved, please provide its new location.

• when delete and re-create the disk as the user:

• Insufficient permission to access file

Any more ideas?

[skoehler]

OK, that seemed to be a openSuSE 11.0 related problem. After upgrade to openSuSE 11.1, it works just fine