Cannot mount a VMware shared filesystem

Question

I updated VMware Fusion to 8.5.6 on a MacBook with OSX 10.11.6. I downloaded and installed the most recent VMware Tools (VMware-Tools-10.1.5-core-5055683). The guest OS is Debian 8. Although cut&paste now works, I can't mount a shared directory. Although the shared directory is there:

$ sudo vmware-hgfsclient 
common

and the mount point is there:

$ ls /media
cdrom cdrom0 common

the mount command fails:

$ sudo mount -v -t vmhgfs  .host:/common /media/common
Original command line: "/sbin/mount.vmhgfs -v -o rw .host:/common /media/common"
Host component of share name is ".host"
Directory component of share name is "/common"
Parsing option string: rw
Setting mount read-write
Error: cannot mount filesystem: Invalid argument

I'm not sure what is wrong as the names are correct. The module is also there:

$ lsmod | grep hg
vmhgfs                 65266  0 
vmw_vmci               55383  1 vmhgfs

Am I using the wrong version of the VMware tools?

Answer 1

run command in virtual machine:

mkdir /mnt/hgfs
vmhgfs-fuse .host:/ /mnt/hgfs
# permit other user access
vmhgfs-fuse .host:/ /mnt/hgfs -o allow_other

Answer 2

It seems the VMware Tools and the HGFS mounter do not go hand in hand, i.e. one might have VMware Tools up and running without the HGFS mounter being there. I managed to make it work by downloading the VMware Tools 10.1.0 instead of 10.1.5, installing with vmware-install.pl, AND subsequently running

apt-get install open-vm-tools