Trick: Enable high-speed USB 2.0 support in your VM

If you have created your VM image using an earlier version of VMware Workstation or Server, you possibly see the following error messages or advice:

“"Please upgrade your virtual machine to enable high-speed USB 2.0 support for the device "Removable Disk". An attempt will be made to connect this device to the best available host controller. This may result in an undefined behavior for this device"

In this case open the VM and click "VM" on the menu bar and select "Upgrade or Change Version". Select Workstation 6.0 as the type of VM.  Remember, if this VM came from an older version, you might want to upgrade the VM Tools as well.

In some cases, you can’t upgrade your  VM  because the menu entry  "Upgrade or Change Version" is grey and not changeable.   In this case you have to open your vmx-file using your favorite editor and add the following line:

ehci.present = "true"

Save it and restart the VM. You are now able to use your USB 2.0 devices without problems.

Trick: ssh-xfer: Quickly grabbing files over an existing SSH connection

The Secure Shell (SSH) and Secure Copy (SCP) make remotely performing system administration and copying files across secure links a painless operation. SSH and SCP use the same SSH protocol to protect network communications, but they rely on users knowing if they want a shell or to copy a file beforehand. You cannot easily use an existing SSH shell connection to a remote machine and just grab one or two files; if you want the files, you'll have to make another SSH connection for the file copy using SCP -- unless you have ssh-xfer.

The ssh-xfer project uses the local SSH agent to allow you to easily grab files using an existing SSH shell connection. You do not have to modify either the SSH client or server programs to use ssh-xfer -- but you will need to patch your ssh-agent. Although having to patch the ssh-agent is not ideal, you do gain one major advantage by doing this: you can send a file through more than one SSH connection.

Read more at Linux.com