Knowledge Base

Shared folders do not work with a default installation of SUSE 9.1 as a guest operating system because of an incompatibility with SELinux. SUSE 9.1 uses SELinux enhancements by default, causing VMware Tools to fail when trying to access a shared folder.

To work around this problem, disable SELinux when you boot the SUSE guest operating system. You can do this in one of two ways:

• To temporarily disable SELinux, specify the selinux=0 boot option interactively during bootup.
  • If your boot loader is LILO, press Tab when you see the LILO: prompt, then type selinux=0 and press Enter.
  • If your boot loader is GRUB, press E when you see the GRUB menu. Navigate to the kernel line and type selinux=0 at the end of the line, then press Enter.
  You need to do this step every time you boot the guest operating system.
• To permanently disable SELinux, specify the selinux=0 boot option in your boot loader configuration file.
  • If your boot loader is LILO, open /etc/lilo.conf with a text editor and find the default stanza. If the stanza has an append= line, add selinux=0 at the end of the quoted append value. If the default stanza does not have an append= line, add the line append="selinux=0". Exit the editor, saving your changes, and run LILO from a shell prompt.
  • If your boot loader is GRUB, open /boot/grub/grub.conf or /etc/grub.conf with a text editor and find the default stanza. Add selinux=0 at the end of the line beginning with the word kernel. Exit the editor, saving your changes.
  After making the change to the LILO or GRUB configuration, reboot the guest operating system. The setting persists across future reboots.

Supported customers who need to use SELinux in the virtual machine can contact VMware Technical Support for an updated version of VMware Tools that fixes this issue.