How to make smooth USB access available to Virtualbox vm

[Bernt Hansson]

On 2016-07-05 16:15, Manish Jain wrote:
> On 07/05/16 12:02, Polytropon wrote:
>> On Tue, 5 Jul 2016 08:10:49 +0200, CeDeROM wrote:
>>> The USB support on VirtualBox is highly unreliable and version
>>> dependant - it works with some releases and with some releases it does
>>> not work as expected - not only on FreeBSD (I also use OSX version).
>>> This is really annoying when USB stops working after an update to a
>>> new version and you depend on this USB access with your work :-(
>> Just an idea:
>>
>> Why not mount the USB stick on the FreeBSD host system (or even
>> have Gnome automount it), then make the mount directory accessible
>> to the "Windows" guest through localhost FTP, localhost SAMBA, or
>> another means of virtual network?
>>
>> It sounds so stupid - it could actually work! ;-)
>>
> Sounds a bit far-fetched and would anyway need to be implemented all
> over again every time I install FreeBSD.
>
> Just wondering if this is possible - I remember there was an application
> (Nero, I think) - which made it possible to copy/paste to CD/DVD RW from
> Explorer itself, without the need to actually burn it via a CD/DVD
> frontend. Is there any way I can use a CD/DVD just as a part of the
> regular filesystem ? If that is possible, the need for USB support in
> vbox would largely be mitigated.
>
> Is there any other non-USB device which can fill in the need to make
> shared data available to the guest machine ? IOMEGA floppies I think are
> no longer used, but if there is something which provides seamless
> access, I would not mind buying some hardware to solve the problem for
> good (considering the magnitude of the problem, make that 'for very good').
>
> Thanks for any tips.
Perhaps this is worth a try.

http://linux.bytesex.org/misc/webfs.html