*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..
Ohh crap, looks like vmware-config.pl rewrites /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd with the original values. Have to watch out to restore the changes after running it.
Many thanks for the fix. This got VMware-server-2.0.0-122956.x86_64 going on Fedora 10 x86_64.
Looks like someone filed a bug. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=464899
da best. Keep it going! Thank you
The article is ver good. Write please more
Hi, very nice post. I have been wonder’n bout this issue,so thanks for posting
Thanks all, I’ll do my best to post some more fixes, upgrading to Fedora 11 on monday, let’s see what surprises that throws my way.
How soon will you update your blog? I’m interested in reading some more information on this issue.
Thanks. That was great, now where is the bookmark button