16.04 guest on 16.04 host - "VBoxClient: Failed to connect to the VirtualBox kernel service, rc=VERR_ACCESS_DENIED"

Question

I have Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS amd64 host with Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.1.30-118389~Ubuntu~xenial from their repository.

I have created Ubuntu 16.04 LTS amd64 guest in VBox. Installed all updates here with aptitude. Also I installed virtualbox-guest-x11 (version 5.0.40-dfsg-0ubuntu1.16.04.2 from multiverse repository) to guest.

After logging in to the VM I get the following notification:

Why this happen?
Should I install the same version (5.1.30) of guest additions as host VirtualBox?

Solution

How I got it working for me:

My setup:

• VirtualBox 6.0.4

• Host machine - Ubuntu 18.04

• Guest machine in virtualbox - Kali 2019.1 kernel version 4.19.0

Install needed packages with apt on GUEST machine

apt-get install build-essential virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11 virtualbox-guest-dkms

After this, run:

VBoxClient --clipboard

Also, make sure that you have enabled Shared Clipboard from Settings>General>Advanced on the HOST machine.

Now it should be working :)

Comments

[sanre]

NOTE: On VirtualBox 6.1, --clipboard has changed to --clipboard-mode

[Coffee_fan]

Thanks. It sent me in the right direction. In my case however, because I install the guest additions via the Virtualbox provided disk, I did not need the virtualbox-* packages + I needed to do sudo VBoxClient --clipboard, otherwise I still got the permission denied errors.