VMware Client Integration Plugin (CIP) v6.0 Issue on Mac OS X

So for a little while I have noticed that I could not get the VMware Client Integration Plugin to work for v6.0. I had tried on multiple Mac machines that I have to isolate the issue. I was never able to really resolve the issue…until today. I decided to do some digging around on the CLI on my Mac to see if I could get any debug information.

First, I needed to find out where the CIP binaries were and what was being executed when a browser was opened. Of course, on any Mac, you will find the applications in /Applications. In this case, the full path to the CIP is /Applications/VMware Client Integration Plug-in.app/Contents/Library. In here you will find all of the contents of the CIP package. Two particular things to note are the vmware-csd and vmware-csd-installer binaries.

vmware-csd

After trying to run either one of the binaries from the CLI you will be faced with the following error:

vmware-csd-error

As you can see, we have a potential error when trying to load a library. If we look to see if the requested library exists you will find that the directory it is looking for doesn’t exist. What does that mean? You guessed it, the library doesn’t exist…or at least not in the place the CIP is hoping to find it. Let’s fix that…

You will want to do the following to resolve this piece of the puzzle:

  1. cd /Applications/VMware Client Integration Plug-in.app/Contents/Library/lib
  2. sudo mkdir -pv /build/toolchain/mac32/openssl-1.0.1p/lib1
  3. sudo cp libcrypto.1.0.1.dylib /build/toolchain/mac32/openssl-1.0.1p/lib/.1
  4. sudo cp libssl.1.0.1.dylib /build/toolchain/mac32/openssl-1.0.1p/lib/.1
  5. cd /Applications/VMware Client Integration Plug-in.app/Contents/Library

Once you do this, you can re-run the installer from the CLI to complete the installation. You do this by running sudo ./vmware-csd-installer --install. You will soon see some text scrolling by regarding installation. Give it a little bit to complete because it will sit for a minute at one spot when creating the SSL cert.

When you see this has completed you can test by running the other binary which is the actual CIP binary. Do this by running ./vmware-csd. You will see the following:

vmware-csd-test

If your results look like the above image then you should be good to go in both Chrome and Firefox. I know this isn’t a pretty fix but at least we can use the functionality again.

Hope this helps out! Let me know if you run into any issues or if this does not work for you!


  1. 02.03.2017 - Path to the libraries have been updated due to updates to openssl on macOS. [return]