Bug 128960

Summary:	VMWare 5.0 can't use physical disks when started from ordinary user, only when started from root
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0	Reporter:	Rainer Klier <kra>
Component:	Commercial	Assignee:	E-mail List <bnc-team-screening>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	SuSE Linux 10.0
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Rainer Klier 2005-10-18 09:42:52 UTC

when running vmware as ordinary user, you can't use physical disks anymore.
under suse 9.3 there was no problem.
of course i did all steps described in 
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/15963.html.
after this, you can start vmware, but when creating a virtual machine or using
an existing virtual machine using physical disks it stops with an "unsufficient
permissions" error.
when running vmware as root, it works.
i also added the group "disk" to the ordinary user, but that didn't help either.
it seems it has to do something with accessing /dev/hda....

Comment 1 Rainer Klier 2005-10-18 09:52:12 UTC

here are the exact error-messages:

when starting existing virtual machine created under suse 9.3 the following error occurs:
"Unable to change virtual machine power state: Unable to open file "": Insufficient permission to access file.."

when trying to create new virtual machine using physical disks the following error occurs:
"Insufficient permission to access file."

Comment 2 Rainer Klier 2005-10-18 10:14:42 UTC

fixed it!
the problem was, that when upgrading from suse 9.3 to suse 10.0 the permissions from /dev/hda became reseted.
they were set to:
brw-r-----  1 root disk 3, 0 Oct 18 10:51 /dev/hda

but to use a physical disk you also have to have write permissions, and in this setup, the group disk has NO write permissions.
i set the permissions to:
brw-rw----  1 root disk 3, 0 Oct 18 10:51 /dev/hda

and now, it works again.