Virtualbox Shared Folder Missing

Here is a short write up of my experience configuring Shared Folders under Oracle Virtualbox 5.2.2 for a Kali 2017.3  appliance. After importing the appliance, I am warned USB 2.0 can only be supported after installing the Oracle Virtualbox Extension Pack, obtained here. You can double click on the installer and Virtualbox will pick up and carry the installation through completion. After that, I reboot.

Next step is to install the  virtualbox-guest-x11 package instead of using the supplied package available through the cdrom0 device in vm settings. I try the advice listed here. After a reboot, I check /media and there is still no monted folder.

Turns out I need to manually mount the drive in my guest operating system.

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000 C_DRIVE ~/Documents/cdrive/

Additional resources regarding shared folders can be referenced on the Ubuntu wiki.

I was curious what the options, “-o uid=1000, gid=1000″ meant. Turns out we’re setting the owners of this folder to the user with an id of 1000 and the group with an id of 1000. If you’d like to discover the uid and gid of a user, run the following two commands.

id -u <username>

id -g <groupname>

You can learn more about userid and groupid by having a look at this help page at Indiana University.