virtualbox + perl + shared folder == fail - linux

Question

This is a convoluted one so bear with me. I have a Perl script that is located on a Windows VirtualBox guest. I want to call this script from the Linux host and have it read a shared folder from the host. The reading of the folder fails.
On the host I call this script and it gives me the following output:
host:~/$ ./script.pl /nfs/nasi/temp
[2014-04-02 10:50:55] Uploading file records to localhost
[2014-04-02 10:50:55] Running VirtualBox for Kaspersky
fatal: opendir(E:\nasi\temp) failed: No such file or directory
[2014-04-02 10:50:56] Uploading malware samples data to localhost
host:$
The script converts the argument /nfs/nasi/temp to E:\nasi\temp and calls the script using the following command:
/usr/bin/VBoxManage guestcontrol <guest> execute \
--image "C:\strawberry\perl\bin \perl.exe" \
--username <user> --password <pass> \
--wait-stdout --wait-stderr --wait-exit -- \
"C:\antivirus\kaspersky.pl" "E:\nasi\temp"
When I run this same script using the same option from the guest directly however I get the following:
C:\antivirus>C:\strawberry\perl\bin\perl.exe C:\antivirus\kaspersky.pl E:\nasi\temp
[2014-04-02 10:54:19] Running Kaspersky Antivirus
[2014-04-02 10:54:20] Parsing Kaspersky report
[2014-04-02 10:54:20] Uploading Kaspersky results to 10.0.0.1
C:\antivirus>
But wait, it gets weirder. When instead of providing the shared directory E:\ I instead point it to C:\ it has no problem reading the directory and just happily keeps going. So the error only shows up when I run the command from the host through VirtualBox and point it to the share.
Here is the relevant code:
sub createSamplesMap {
opendir( my $dh, $ARGV[0] ) or
die "fatal: opendir($ARGV[0]) failed: $!\n";
my #files = readdir( $dh );
foreach my $file ( #files ) {
if (! -d $file ) {
...
}
}
closedir($dh);
}
I tried different ways of reading the filenames from the directory but they didn't work. Here's what I tried.
my #files = <$ARGV[0]\\*>;
my #files = glob( $ARGV[0] . '\\*' );
I don't know whether to blame perl or virtualbox. Anyone have any ideas on what the problem might be?
Windows 7, Strawberry Perl v5.18.2
Ubuntu 12.04.04, Perl v5.14.2
VirtualBox 4.2.16r86992
crosspost: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=61011

Answer 1

I've found the problem. As mentioned on the virtualbox forum there was a problem with the environment variables set when running the perl script. After much googling I also found a blog post from kissmyarch where he describes how he solved the problem.
You can set environment variables using the --environment option in VBoxManage guestcontrol and according to kissmyarch you need to set USERPROFILE to get it to work. This did not work for me.
So instead I used the following code from the script to figure out what environment variables were set:
foreach $key (sort keys(%ENV)) {
print "$key = $ENV{$key}\n";
}
and ran that both on the guest and from guestcontrol to compare the environments. My command now looks like this:
/usr/bin/VBoxManage guestcontrol <vm> execute \
--image "C:\strawberry\perl\bin\perl.exe" \
--username <user> --password <pass> \
--environment "USERPROFILE=C:\Users\<user>" \
--environment "APPDATA=C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming" \
--environment "LOCALAPPDATA=C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local" \
--environment "HOMEDRIVE=C:" \
--environment "HOMEPATH=\Users\<user>" \
--environment "LOGONSERVER=\\\<server>" \
--environment "SESSIONNAME=Console" \
--environment "TEMP=C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp" \
--environment "TMP=C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp" \
--environment "USERDOMAIN=<domain>" \
--environment "USERNAME=<user>" \
--wait-stdout --wait-stderr --wait-exit \
-- "C:\antivirus\kaspersky.pl" "E:\nasi\temp"
Somewhere in that big pile of environment variables is one that is important.
Thanks to all that helped.