High Sierra Fusion 6 - installation destroyed my file permissions

[avguser]

Hello,

I had installed VMware previously in my High Sierra installation but then I upgraded HDD and migrated my user profile to new installation. After a year I decided to install my last licensed VMware Fusion 6.0.6 so I downloaded it, opened .dmg and clicked the only installation icon in the image.

Nothing opened but I saw intensive disk activity. After a while the activity stopped so I looked to Launcher and found VMware icon so I executed it and it asked me something related to initialization, maybe it detected some files in Library folder of previous installation, I completely forgot what it was so I just selected one of two options and it showed WMware window that it is doing initialization. I think it asked for admin password two times, once when executed installation and second time when executed VMware from the Launcher.

Suddenly my running apps started showing errors so I checked processes consuming disk activity and I found only “chown” command:

chown -R -- root wheel

Then I noticed ownership of my home changed to root recursively so I killed it and changed user back, now I need to compare with backup group membership + check root filesystem because seems it was executed on / too. Now I am a bit scared to reboot my Mac because it behaves strangly and shows keychain issues despite ownership of my home is back and I fear it won’t boot.

Thus going to have long and productive evenings thanks to this amazing software.

I wonder if anyone experienced similar problem or could possibly say what was going on and how to prevent it. I still do have plan to use my licensed version of VMware for my virtual machines.

Thanks for any comments or advice

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Yep painful indeed.

Yes it has been reported before, see here:

Permission destruction?

This was addressed in VMware Fusion 8.5.8 as far as I can tell.

edit: Oh and as far as Fusion 6 goes...

VMware Fusion 6.x does not run on macOS High Sierra.

If you had Fusion 8 installed and then upgrade, it might work, but would not be supported.

So you would need at least Fusion 10 in order to run on a host with macOS High Sierra.

Beware though that Fusion 10 has different hardware requirements as Fusion 6.

--

Wil

[avguser]

Thank you very much for the reply although it’s negative... I fear I won’t be able to fix all permissions with missing full system backup and removed OSX feature to fix filesystem permissions. Never expected such a problem so I only have included /Users in TimeMachine but after this experience seems I will have to back up everything. (and my friends wonder why I am so paranoid - well, experiences...)

btw it almost reminds me the critical issue in one of older releases of OSX that removed Home in certain situation when switched to another user. The only thing I am disappointed about is the fact that VMware allowed me to download their buggy package even without single notification about this critical issue, not even talking that it should have been fixed in all releases that are still offered.

Now when reading the negative review for Fusion 11 seems this issue was the last nail into the coffin of relationship between me and VMware, time to convert VMs to Parallels and say farewell. Fusion/Workstation is obviously not a product that represents this company so the quality stays below ice.

[wila]

Hi,

I understand the negative feelings after going through something like that.

Big mistakes happen everywhere though.

Yes backups are the best way to protect yourself against things like this.

FWIW, I never bumped into this issue and from the amount of times it was reported here, it seems to be a very odd case. Only seen a handful of reports in years of reading the forums here every day. Plenty of less serious issues have been reported many more times. You've just been unlucky.

Not sure what negative review about Fusion 11 you've been reading, personally I'm quite happy with it.

Hope that Parallels will serve you better and wish you the best of luck.

--

Wil