Figure out shared folders

[ColdHeat]

Not entirely sure if this is working or it isn't. But it would greatly increase usage if mech supported shared folders properly.

[ColdHeat]

The problem it seems is that some Vagrant VMs don't have the feature enabled by default.

By running the following commands you should be able to turn it on.

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo vmware-config-tools.pl

Perhaps we can also explore sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools

[ColdHeat]

Also there are problems if the VM is unable to be connected to because it is missing a network adapter.

[ColdHeat]

It seems like vmrun is not properly linking the current directory to the vmx. Once it gets set, it doesn't change. Looks like we might need to rewrite the vmx here again as well.

[arizvisa]

does vmrun enableSharedFolders and vmrun disableSharedFolders not work for you if the vmware tools are installed? or is this referring to something else?

[ColdHeat]

I am not sure, those commands should only work if VMWare Tools is installed. There aren't a lot of things besides start and stop that will work if Tools aren't installed.

[arizvisa]

Yeah, I think vagrant expects you to have VMware tools installed in order to provide support for shared folders. So it should be an assumed requirement and not something that's actually enforced by mech. Most json templates for hashicorp's packer include the installation of VMware tools as part of the build anyways, so I think it's a safe assumption.

[thumbidea]

I just discovered Mech today. Awesome work.

I've been experimenting with shared folders. I've tried several boxes and tried reinstalling both vmware-tools and open-vm-tools with no luck. The shared folders don't get mounted when the box is brought up.

I was able to manually get shared folders working by doing:

$ mech init bento/ubuntu-14.04
$ mech up
$ mech ssh
> mkdir shared
> vmhgfs-fuse .host:/mech ~/shared

This tells me that the vmware-tools in the bento/ubuntu-14.04 box are working correctly. I'm guessing that the problem is a missing mount point in the image.

BTW, vmhgfs-fuse requires that the mount point be owned by the user invoking it.

The README.md recommends:

vmhgfs-fuse .host:/mech /mnt/hgfs

I think this should be:

sudo mkdir /mnt/hgfs/mech
sudo vmhgfs-fuse .host:/mech /mnt/hgfs/mech