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pedroponting
Contributor
Contributor

Can't share Mac folders with Centos 8 VM.

I have clicked 'Enable Shared Folders' but a warning says "Shared folders will not be available in the virtual machine until VMware Tools is installed and running".

In the "Virtual Machine" menu, "Reinstall VMware Tools" is greyed out.

In the VM, I did 'yum install open-vm-tools openvm-tools-desktop' which appeared to go hunky-dory. I can indeed see both packages listed when I do 'yum list'. However, 'systemctl start open-vm-tools' gives me "Failed to start open-vm-tools.service: Unit open-vm-tools.service not found."

I bought a pro license which I believe came with 3 months support or something, but so far I have been completely unable to open a support ticket. Getting very   .

Help anyone?

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nachogonzalez
Commander
Commander

Hey, hope you are doing good
Might be the silliest question, but what is the uptime for this VM?
Have you tried rebooting it? Can you please try and share VM's processes? (with ps)

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pedroponting
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, yes I have tried rebooting, several times while trying various things. So do you really want a list of all running processes (it's long!)?

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nachogonzalez
Commander
Commander

If you can grep it for "open" that'd be awesome

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Rollin899
Contributor
Contributor

I'm not running CentOS but in the latest Kali 2020.3 there is a script in /usr/local/sbin called mount-shared-folders. I have to run that before it works. Clipboard is still hit and miss. Here is one of the links I used: https://www.kali.org/docs/virtualization/install-vmware-tools-kali-guest/

I also had to install "fuse".

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pedroponting
Contributor
Contributor

Hey. There's nothing running when I grep for 'open'.

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bluefirestorm
Champion
Champion

The VMware Tools process name is vmtoolsd.

There is a known problem with Shared Folders for Linux VMs. Try the workaround suggested in the release notes.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Tools/11.1/rn/VMware-Tools-1115-Release-Notes.html#knownissues

  • Shared Folders mount is unavailable on Linux VM.If the Shared Folders feature is enabled on a Linux VM while it is powered off, shared folders mount is not available on restart. Note: This issue is applicable for VMware Tools running on Workstation and Fusion.

Workaround: If the VM is powered on, disable and enable the Shared Folders feature from the interface.
For resolving the issue permanently, edit /etc/fstab and add an entry to mount the Shared Folders automatically on boot.
For example, add the line:
vmhgfs-fuse   /mnt/hgfs    fuse    defaults,allow_other    0    0

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