VMware Server 2.0 and Fedora 9 or Fedora 10
Sunday, September 28th, 2008*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..
