Shared folder gets out of sync

[Kentzo]

I was hoping to use VirtualBuddy as a builder while doing all code editing on the host. However, I noticed that files in the shared folder (readonly) can get out of sync and differ from host.

[insidegui]

I've noticed that as well. It seems to be either a bug in Virtualization or in the driver that controls the shared storage in the guest OS. I suggest submitting this as feedback to Apple on Feedback Assistant. If anyone finds a workaround or an implementation issue in VirtualBuddy that we could fix, please let me know.

[Kentzo]

My current workaround is via SMB shares:

1. Make a share-only user on the Host and/or VM
2. Make a shared folder and assign this user with read-only* access to that folder
3. Modify ACLs of the shared folder via chmod to include directory_inherit and file_inherit to make sure the user will have access to everything inside the directory regardless of further UNIX permissions
4. Mount it inside the VM or Host

*I would recommend to avoid SMB read-write shares as ACLs and locking on macOS might lead to situations that are unresolvable via Finder and annoying to deal with in CLI.

Perhaps an alternative FUSE filesystem, such as SSHFS would work better.

[Kentzo]

After using this for a while, I found that it doesn't work well for my use case too. With both builtin NFSv3 and SMB servers I occasionally hit problems:

• Phantom permissions issues, where macOS would deny editing and deleting despite proper UNIX permissions and ACLs
• Access issues, where a client would fail to read contents of files reporting they are empty or malformed (depending on the app doing the reading)

New workaround is running an rsyncd in the VM and manually pushing and pulling on the host when needed.

/etc/rsyncd.conf in the VM:

pid file = /var/run/rsyncd.pid

[Share]
path = ...
use chroot = no
munge symlinks = no
open noatime = yes
dont compress = yes
hosts allow = my-macbook.local
read only = no
write only = no
uid = 501
gid = 20

Running rsync daemon in the VM:

sudo rsync --config /etc/rsyncd.conf --daemon --no-detach

Pulling on the Host:

# pull.txt lists files to pull from the VM
rsync --files-from=pull.txt -rlptgoNEW --ignore-missing-args --inplace --info=progress2 -h --chown=macbook-user:staff rsync://my-vm.local/Share .

Pushing on the Host:

# push.txt lists files to push to the VM
rsync --files-from=push.txt -rlptgoNEW --ignore-missing-args --inplace --info=progress2 -h --chown=vm-user:staff . rsync://my-vm.local/Share