Bug 128960 - VMWare 5.0 can't use physical disks when started from ordinary user, only when started from root
Summary: VMWare 5.0 can't use physical disks when started from ordinary user, only whe...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: SUSE LINUX 10.0
Classification: openSUSE
Component: Commercial (show other bugs)
Version: Final
Hardware: i686 SuSE Linux 10.0
: P5 - None : Major
Target Milestone: ---
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QA Contact: E-mail List
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Reported: 2005-10-18 09:42 UTC by Rainer Klier
Modified: 2005-10-18 10:14 UTC (History)
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Found By: Other
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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.