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September 14, 2009

Fix hanging vmware tools on linux

Filed under: Virtualization — Tags: , — Nate @ 5:48 pm

I can’t be the only one who has come across this, back in early June I filed a support case with VMware around the fact that roughly 90% of the time when the latest version of vmware-tools that shipped with vSphere loaded on my CentOS 5 systems it would hang part way through, if I logged into the console I and just pressed <enter> it would continue loading. Naturally the Tier 1 support rep was fairly useless, wanting me to do some stupid things to get more debug information.

I went off on my own and traced down the problem to the vmware-config-tools.pl script towards the end of the script at around line 11,600, where it tries to make a symlink. If I disable the offending code the problem stops(the link it’s trying to create is in fact already there):

sub symlink_icudt38l {
my $libdir = db_get_answer('LIBDIR');
install_symlink($libdir . '/icu', $gRegistryDir . '/icu');
}

If your interested in the strace output:

[..]
[pid  7228] <... read resumed> "", 4096) = 0
[pid  7228] --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
[pid  7228] fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFIFO|0600, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
[pid  7228] close(4)                    = 0
[pid  7228] rt_sigaction(SIGHUP, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_IGN}, 8) = 0
[pid  7228] rt_sigaction(SIGINT, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_DFL}, 8) =  0
[pid  7228] rt_sigaction(SIGQUIT, {SIG_IGN},  {SIG_DFL}, 8) = 0
[pid  7228] wait4(7244, [{WIFEXITED(s)  && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 0}], 0, NULL) = 7244
[pid   7228] rt_sigaction(SIGHUP, {SIG_IGN}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid   7228] rt_sigaction(SIGINT, {SIG_DFL}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid   7228] rt_sigaction(SIGQUIT, {SIG_DFL}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid  7228] lstat("/etc/vmware-tools/icu", {st_mode=S_IFLNK|0777,  st_size=25, ...}) = 0
[pid  7228] read(0, 

The last line there the system is waiting for input, when I hit <enter> it continues loading.

The support case sat..and sat..and sat. Then a couple of weeks ago some manager called me up and wanted to know how the case was doing. I guess they didn’t spend any time on it at all. I told him I already found a workaround, and he said because of that they were going to work up a KB entry on it then close the case. Then another week passes and I get an email saying OH! We see you found a workaround, we’ll forward that to engineering and get back to you. Yes the workaround I sent on JUNE 16.

So hope this helps someone, I’ll update this when/if they get a KB entry out on it. It’s certainly saved me a lot of time, it is very annoying to have to connect to each and every system to press enter to get it to continue to boot to workaround this bug.

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