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USB not showing up in VMware

For the longest time USB used to work quite well in VMware, then as if by magic, it all stopped working. However, after poking around I've discovered that there is a solution and it involves usbfs (usbdevfs). So here is a solution to get you all back up and running.

  • Create a new user group and name it usbfs, let's say that it has gid 1003
  • within /etc/fstab change the following line usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0- if you have it, change it to below, if you don't have it, then just add the following line usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw, devgid=1003, devmode=0640, busgid=1003, busmode=0550, listgid=1003, listmode=0440 0 0- add vmware users to group usbfs usermod -G usbfs vmwareuser- If you get an error like this: mount: mount point /proc/bus/usb does not exist - then you have to compile a custom kernel from sources with CONFIG_USB_DEVICEFS enabled.

SSH with Public Key Authentication

Okay, say you have a server, you have to ssh to this server ... say 20 times a day? It gets irritating having to login and type your password repeatedly. Not to mention it can be insecure if anyone is sniffing the network.

So on your desktop machine you want to create some keys. This can be done with the following command:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

At the prompts just press enter for all the defaults. This includes an empty password.

Now you should have a file in .ssh/id_rsa.pub , this file has to go to the server. You can do this with this command

cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh username@servername "cat - >>.ssh/authorized_keys"

All going well, this should exit cleanly. Test it by ssh'ing again to the server normally, if all goes well it shouldn't prompt but just drop you into your remote shell. If this fails make sure your servers /etc/ssh/sshd_config has the following line

RSAAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys

Also, you will need specific permissions in order for this to work as well, so the follow needs to be run as the user you are logged in as.

server$ chmod go-w ~/ server$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh server$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Enjoy your keyless SSH access.