Horizon Agent install with USB redirect and DKMS

[so2s]

Hi

On Ubuntu 20.04 (probably also other distros and versions) the Horizon Agent installer for Linux failes when using the "-U yes" option to activate USB redirection when the VHCI driver is installed with DKMS.
(The installer can't find the kernel driver modules)

There is also an issue with the documentation for installing the VHCI driver. (System Requirements for Horizon Agent for Linux)

The docmentation for the use of DKMS incorrectly states that you should configure DKMS to install the driver at a specified path (DEST_MODULE_LOCATION in dkms.conf). But the man-file for dksm on Ubuntu 20.04 states that:

"DEST_MODULE_LOCATION is ignored on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SuSE
Linux Enterprise Server 10 and higher, Novell SuSE Linux 10.0 and higher, and
Ubuntu. Instead, the proper distribution-specific directory is used."

This problem has existed for a long time. I found this patch for agent 7.6 posted over 3 years ago, but the problem still persists in version 8.4 that we're using.

It's a really simple fix when you know what to look for. But having to patch the installer for every update is getting rather frustrating.

Please fix this!

[B1naryc0de]

I haven't tried using DKMS but even when installing the agent following these instructions: 

apt-get install make
apt-get install gcc
apt-get install libelf-dev

Compile and install the VHCI drivers.
tar -xzvf vhci-hcd-1.15.tar.gz
cd vhci-hcd-1.15
patch -p1 < full-path_to_patch-file
make clean && make && make install​

The USB device is seen when typing

lsusb

but never gets mounted.

At first I thought it was because it was being patched using an old kernel module I had so I ran

apt autoremove

and rebooted but that didn't fix it.

I made a post as well about this and I simply can't find what's wrong.

There's also logs in /tmp/vmware-root but they aren't really providing any good info, or I might not be understanding them 🙂

[so2s]

In my case the driver does work. 

Have you tried to check if the driver gets loaded with:

lsmod | grep vhci

 You need to recompile and install the driver whenever the kernel gets updated (pretty frequently these days...). Thats why I went the DKMS-route to automate this.

[B1naryc0de]

Hi,

Not loaded, even when running the patch I still can't get the vhci .15 to load?!

Thanks for your reply 🙂

[B1naryc0de]

These are the steps i've done to install the driver:

cd /tmp
tar zxvf VMware-horizonagent-linux-x86_64-2111.1-8.4.0-19155374.tar.gz

apt-get install make gcc libelf-dev
download the 1.15 zip https://sourceforge.net/projects/usb-vhci/files/linux%20kernel%20module/
tar xzvf vhci-hcd-1.15.tar.gz
cd vhci-hcd-1.15
patch -p1 < /tmp/VMware-horizonagent-linux-x86_64-2111.1-8.4.0-19155374/resources/vhci/patch/vhci.patch
make clean && make && make install

cd /tmp/VMware-horizonagent-linux-x86_64-2111.1-8.4.0-19155374
./install_viewagent.sh -A yes -U yes

reboot

if I issue a lsmod | grep vhci I don't see the driver, but if I do a modprobe usb_vhci_hcd and perform lsmod | grep vhci again, I can see it's loaded.

I'll plug in a USB key at this point on the thin client but nothing ever shows up. I can see the key is detected by the OS with lsusb but no USB key ever shows up. I can't even mount it because it's not showing up as a /dev/sdb device.

Thanks for helping!

[songkai · Accepted solution]

Sorry,  the DKMS steps in the user guide is expired, we will update the user guide and fix the installer issue as soon as possible.

[padulka]

Hi @songkai, any update for this issue?

I'm the same problem with version 22.04, I see the USB device (pen drive) only as tsclient and not as USB device.

Thanks

Federico