VMware server usb devices not listed on Mandriva host
I’ve been using vmware server quite a bit of course, I’ve mentioned it before. I had never played around with accessing a usb device in the guest environment though. When I tried (host operating system is Mandriva 2006)…. nothing was listed, in spite of several devices being plugged in (and unmounted from the host.) So, I looked around and found that according to this…. that vmware feature requires USBFS to be mounted on /proc/bus/usb …. Some systems that don’t do this by default are…. Ubuntu Linux 6.06, SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit……………. so how do you fix it?
As root… (or sudo’ing…)
mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb
the virtual machine guest will need to reboot to become aware of the change…. if you want to make the change in your /etc/fstab file add the following line….
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0
If the line is already existing there, check that it says “auto” instead of “noauto”. I’m not sure what affect this has on automounting of usb devices in the affected host operating systems.