VMWare Sharing

[schmudde]

I installed VMWare Tools and started sharing. Not only is my folder not showing up in /mnt/hgfs but I'm getting an error when I try to suspend (attached).

I'm running VMWare Fusion 7.0.1 and OSX Yosemite 10.10.

Thanks!

Schmüdde

[schmudde]

I tried updating to Yosemite 10.10.1 and reinstalling the tools from scratch and still nothing.

[wila]

Hi,

What is your ubuntu version, version number and did you install a desktop or is this a server setup without X?

Did you setup shared folders? (under menu Virtual Machine -> Sharing -> Sharing settings) (after rereading your "I started sharing" part I guess you did)

--

Wil

[schmudde]

Thanks for the response Will.

I installed Ubuntu Server 14.04.1 LTS. No X. Does that mean anything? Hope to get this resolved. I just got the Fusion 7 Black Friday deal.

And yeah, I setup shared folders in the menu.

Thanks,

Schmüdde

[wila]

Hi,

It means that it should work. I'm downloading the image here now and will setup a quick VM with that, see if there's something I am bumping into with installing VMware Tools and using shared folders.

Will let you know what I find.

--

Wil

[wila]

Hi,

I did run easy setup on the server install and that gave the exact same result as you mentioned after installing VMware Tools.

Errors on suspend and errors on enabling the share, I can see a /mnt/hgfs folder, but there's no shared data.

Then downloaded and installed Fusion 7.1.0 and upgraded the vmware tools (actually it did that by itself)

Now the errors on suspend are gone, but the vmware host guest file sharing still is broken.

Will let you know if I find out why, but unfortunately my time is very limited so don't get your hopes up yet.

--

Wil

[wila · Accepted solution]

Back,

There's no pre-built vmhgfs kernel module in the setup for kernel 3.13.0.32 so you'll have to compile it yourself.

These are roughly the steps:

mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom
cd ~
cp /cdrom/VMwareTools-*.tar.gz .
tar xfz VMwareTools-*.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Press <enter> on any questions asked.

There's also a --default option, but you'll not get warned if the vmhgfs kernel driver is not there (which is why I missed it the first time)

After doing this the /mnt/hgfs share works for me.

--

Wil

[schmudde]

Holy cow - thank you! I see it described here on the Ubuntu page thanks to your insight:

Ubuntu Manpage: vmhgfs - vmware kernel module

You're incredibly helpful. I think this means that I would have to recompile this into the kernel every time there I update the kernel. That's not really ideal in my development scenario. We'd like all the machines to run the exact same kernel.

I think I may just need to run it as a regular old server and then set up my Mac to see the IP and develop that way. If I need to move a file, I'll just have to do it through an ftp/ssh connection or a USB drive.

Does that seem possible? It might be an awkward solution to tunnel into a virtual machine on the same physical machine in that way. Could I use Samba?

Thanks so much.

Schmüdde

[wila]

Hi,

Yes I was a bit surprised myself that there wasn't a pre-built module for hgfs on a current 14.04 LTS release.

AFAIK VMware is working on getting everything into the open-vm-tools, but this module isn't there yet.

Using industry standard ways for transferring files (ssh with scp or sshfs/NFS/samba) might be the better way anyways if you need the file sharing for more as just the average file share.

--

Wil

[schmudde]

I wanted to share what I did to get around this. It worked nicely, just in case someone else stumbles upon this same question:

Setup Samba to Share on Ubuntu:

Edit this file:

emacs /etc/samba/smb.conf

Replace the "share definitions" section at the end with (replacing 'YOURHOSTNAME' with the name of your host):

[YOURHOSTNAME]
  comment = Shared Folder
  path = /home/username/shared
  create mask = 0644
  directory mask = 0755
  writeable = yes

Create a user (replacing "username' with your user account name):

smbpasswd -a username

Create the path set as the share point and restart Samba:

mkdir /home/username/shared
chown username:username /home/username/shared
/etc/init.d/samba restart

Then in the Macintosh:

• Finder: Go > Connect to Server
• Name: smb://yourhostname

————————

I also wanted to use Ubuntu as a webserver for Fusion 7. That's documented elsewhere, but I had trouble finding it. So here's what I did.

Setup a Host in Ubuntu:

Configure Apache in Ubuntu

Then configure hosts in your /etc/hosts file with localhost IPs

127.0.0.1 www.example.com

Configure /etc/hosts in Mac OS X with the same host name but the IP of your VM Ware OS:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx www.example.com.

Where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx are derived by running ifconfig on the Ubuntu command line.

ifconfig

Look for the eth0 inet addr. That's the number you want to place in xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx of your /etc/hosts Mac OS X file.