Symlinks broken with vmhgfs on fusion

Question

When I use VMware Fusion with an Ubuntu guest (it worked long ago, but this problem has existed over several generations of ubuntu, at least including natty, oneiric and precise) and shared folders using vmhgfs, no matter what I do, many of my symlinks are broken.

The ones that are broken are symlinks that point to files in subdirectories, such as foo -> bar/blah. They're broken because they're presented to linux as foo->bar.

Anyone have any idea what's going wrong? This has, in the past worked for me, but it just doesn't now. It seems like a bug in vmhgfs.

Please don't suggest using NFS, SMB, etc. I'm specifically interested in getting HGFS working.

Answer 1

I worked around this by using NFS. However that this only gives read-only access.

(NFS server config adapted from http://www.behanna.org/osx/nfs/howto1.html)

On the host edit /etc/exports:

sudo vi /etc/exports

Add a line like the following (presuming your host network is using the 192.168.69.0 subnet, which is what vmware's NAT uses):

/Users -network 192.168.69.0 -mask 255.255.255.0

Enable nfsd:

sudo nfsd enable

Test your work:

showmount -e

On the Linux guest install the nfs client. On Ubuntu this is nfs-common:

sudo apt-get install nfs-common

Create a mount point, if it doesn't already exist:

sudo mkdir /mnt/host

Add the mount to fs-tab:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add a line like this to /etc/fsatb:

/192.168.69.1:/Users /mnt/host nfs _netdev,auto 0 0

Mount the share (it will be automatically mounted at next boot):

sudo mount -a

Answer 2

I filed a ticket with VMWare support and they phoned and had me add the following option to vm_name.vmware/vm name.vmx

sharedFolder0.followSymlinks = "TRUE"

Now the symlinks work, but they appear in the guest as regular files.

This is with VMware Fusion 5.0.1 and Linux Mint 13.

Answer 3

New solution: use old school NFS.

On the OS X host (I have Mountain Lion 10.8.2 as of this writing):

sudo vi /etc/exports

Add a line like

/Users/foo -mapall=foo:staff -network 172.16.241.0 -mask 255.255.255.0

where foo is your username. Note that this will mean that from the perspective of the guest mount all files on the host will be owned by you and have group "staff". Then

sudo nfsd enable
sudo nfsd start

On the Linux guest

sudo apt-get install nfs-common

Then add a line like this to /etc/fstab

172.16.241.1:/Users/foo /mnt/foo_nfs nfs auto,soft,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,rw 0 0

then

sudo mkdir /mnt/foo_nfs
sudo mount /mnt/foo_nfs

Answer 4

Maybe this can help. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1007277

Answer 5

Confirmed works under Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and fails under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS:

root$> mkdir bar
root$> touch bar/blah
root$> ls -l bar
total 1
-rw-r--r-- 1 503 80 0 May  7 16:37 blah
root$> ln -s bar/blah foo
root$> ls -l foo
lrwxr-xr-x 1 503 80 8 May  7 16:30 foo -> bar/blah
root$> cat foo
cat: foo: Is a directory
root$> cd foo
root$> ls -l
total 1
drwxr-xr-x 1 503 80 102 May  7 17:02 blah

I suggest filing a bug report with VMware

Answer 6

I am working around this by using smb sharing instead of hgfs:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/2089295

sudo apt-get install smbfs
sudo mkdir /mnt/foo_smb
echo "username=foo" > /etc/samba/user # where foo is my username on the host.

Add this line to /etc/fstab

//172.16.241.1/foo /mnt/foo_smb cifs noauto,credentials=/etc/samba/user,rw,uid=bar 0 0

where bar is my username on the guest. Finally

sudo mount /mnt/foo_smb

on the guest.

UNFORTUNATELY, after upgrading to os x 10.8.2 recently, this stopped working. Apparrently apple has replaced their SMB server with something called SMBX.

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.cifs/3517

Attempting to mount with the fstab entry above now gives

mount error(22): Invalid argument
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

This can be partially worked around by adding the extra options

iocharset=utf8,nounix,noserverinfo,sec=ntlmssp

but unfortunately the nounix option means that symlinks will not work.

Another option is to add something like

sharedFolder0.followSymlinks = "TRUE"

to the vmx file, but this means symlinks will look like regular files, not symlinks.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1007277