Tommi's stuff

*Update* This also affects Fedora 10

Just ran into quite a bit of trouble trying to get VMware Server 2.0 to run on Fedora 9. After quite a bit of digging I found that vmware-hostd calls PAM and unix_chkpwd seems to cause a problem in hostd. The error message from the VMware Management Web:

The server is not responding. Please check that the server is running and accepting connections.

And after looking through the proccess list I found the following:

root      9817  9741  0 17:26 ?        00:00:00 [unix_chkpwd] <defunct>

My fix was to turn off password authentication in PAM for VMware and hope for a fix from VMware soon. This fix was suggested in this post.

Turning off authentication:

# cat /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd

#%PAM-1.0

auth       required    pam_permit.so

account    required    pam_permit.so

After that I suggest closing out connections to the vmware ports using iptables if you have disabled the default firewall which should keep you safe. Addition to /etc/sysconfig/iptables follows:

-A INPUT -i ! lo -m tcp -p tcp -m multiport --dports 8009,8222,8308,8333 -j REJECT

Hope this helps..

Tags: fedora, vmware

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.