MacOS – VMWare Fusion: Could not open /dev/vmmon error

macosvmware

After updating to Yosemite the only trouble I have is that VMWare Fusion (Professional Version 5.0.5 if that helps) fails to start showing following error:

Could not open /dev/vmmon: No such file or directory.
Please make surethat the kernel module `vmmon' is loaded.

I've tried to google the issue but the only relevant thing found was this:

The Mac has a certain amount of devices it can register in the /dev/ directory …, virtual devices like virtualization software and VPN clients also create devices in this directory quickly filling up the number to the limit. To solve this I went through my installed applications and removed every VPN client and VM software that I don’t require any longer and rebooted my machine. After the reboot everything worked immediately.

But even if this is true, I just can not get rid of my VPN client for example. So, I still have no idea what steps I should take to solve the issue. I'll be very much obliged for any hint how to fix this problem.

Best Answer

After having this issue with macOS High Sierra and VMWare Fusion 8.5.8, I was able to resolve it by allowing the system extension as described in http://planetvm.net/blog/?p=3240

In short; open System Preferences, click Security & Privacy, and from the General tab you should see a message stating System software from developer "VMware, Inc." was blocked from loading. Clicking the Allow button resolved the issue for me.

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MacOS – Am I missing out by not running in 64-bit mode

Lion is not meant to be used in 32bit mode. Also addressing more than 4GB ram with 32bit kernel is slower (it uses PAE).

If the only reason of using Lion in 32bit mode is the Cisco VPN client (yuck!) there is a way. Here is an article explaining how to use the native VPN client instead - it's for 10.6, but should work. It's a matter of configuration, not of software. And here is a forum post that pointed to thad solution.

About the Cisco VPN 3000 hardware - yes, it works with iOS and native OSX VPN client in IPSec mode, and it's a matter of software update and configuration. You should be running at least 4.7.2P according to the CISCO field notice. It's stated that it's not supported, but it works. Here is another success story. Make sure that you're using at least OSX 10.7.2.

ps. being tight on money is not always bad, It usually makes people more creative and makes them think and learn new things. Direct your network admin to serverfault, a place I'm sure he will get decent help.

Metasploit nmap VMware Fusion 5

For what its worth I've seen the same issue with Fusion 6 and nmap. I also saw tcpdump fail as well:

sudo tcpdump -i vmnet8
tcpdump: vmnet8: No such device exists
(BIOCSETIF failed: Device not configured)

After upgrading libpcap to 1.40 and this still not resolving the problem, I found the following outdated post: https://communities.vmware.com/message/693833#693833

Specifically this quote is where the issue lies: "No guarantees, but we can try to take a look at implementing BPF on Fusion's network interfaces in a future release."

This seems to point to the issue being a vmware problem, so I tried VirtualBox 4.3.0 and when using NAT at least, the issues do not occur (nmap also worked for me):

$ ifconfig
…
vboxnet0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ether 0a:00:00:00:00:00
inet 192.168.56.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.56.255

$ sudo tcpdump -i vboxnet0
tcpdump: WARNING: vboxnet0: That device doesn't support promiscuous mode
(BIOCPROMISC: Operation not supported on socket)
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on vboxnet0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes

Best Answer

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MacOS – Am I missing out by not running in 64-bit mode

Metasploit nmap VMware Fusion 5

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