elevate privileges in Windows host if necessary #48
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@pbitty Interested in managing this project (with possibly a few others)? I'm tied up for the next few months, and will not find to appropriately review pull requests. |
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@smdahlen I would love to do this! It would be my first time in a role like this, so it would be ideal to have others to share the work with and learn from. |
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@pbitty Great! @bdcribbs has also agreed to support. Given my current day commitments, if the two of you could review and test incoming pull requests, I would greatly appreciate it. I have made both of you contributors to the project. When you believe we are ready to cut a new gem, let me know, and I will go ahead and push. |
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As a Mac user I can't test the new functionality, but I can confirm that the plugin still behaves correctly on OSX (and presumably other posix systems). I'll leave the merge to pbitty. |
| @@ -8,13 +8,13 @@ def update_guest(machine) | |||
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| if (machine.communicate.test("uname -s | grep SunOS")) | |||
| realhostfile = '/etc/inet/hosts' | |||
| move_cmd = 'mv' | |||
| move_cmd = 'mv' | |||
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I'm glad you fixed the bad indentation here, it makes the code much more readable.
But it is better if commits to fix indentation / code style are separated from commits that make logical changes to the code.
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Thanks @bdcribbs . I agree.
I can re-push this branch without the indentation changes. Would that cause any problems?
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It hasn't been merged yet, so you could do that. On the other hand, I was just being pedantic :) It'd be fine to just merge this in as is.
elevate privileges in Windows host if necessary
This change makes the plugin try to overwrite the hosts file with elevated privileges in a Windows host if it gets an 'access denied' when trying to copy it normally. This allows you to use the plugin in Windows without any permission workarounds.
This has proved useful to me, and I'm wondering if it would be useful to you or anyone else.
Before these changes, I had these options:
This is not ideal for security reasons as any app running under my user can now edit the hosts file without my knowledge.
This is inconvenient because VirtualBox can't run with 'regular' privileges and elevated privileges at the same time. If VirtualBox is already running with regular privileges, you can't launch it elevated - and vice-versa. So to manage any VM I have to remember to call 'cmd' with 'Run as admin...'
Are there other workarounds I don't know about?