This note is about problems with VMWare shared drives failing to mount.

My previous setup was VMWare Fusion 8 and Debian 8 (jessie), with the VMWare-recommended open-vm-tools. After upgrading to VMWare Fusion 10 and Debian 9 (stretch), the shared folder (~) on the Mac was no longer visible from Debian (~/mac, a symbolic link to /mnt/hgfs).

After looking here, I added this line to /etc/fstab:

vmhgfs-fuse /mnt/hgfs fuse defaults,allow_other 0 0

but rebooting hung, and invited me to log in as system to fix the problem.

Other posts in the reference stated that you need to mount to /mnt/hgfs/mac: so, edit the /etc/fstab line to

vmhgfs-fuse /mnt/hgfs/mac fuse defaults,allow_other 0 0

and the system rebooted OK.

Now, make ~/mac a link to /mnt/hgfs/mac:

ln -sf /mnt/hgfs/mac ~/mac

and all is well again.

Incidentally, I found that copy/paste between host and client no longer worked: another Google search led me to

sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop

Reboot, and on we go!