Dmitry Tsvetkov, 123RF.com
VMware Server 2.0 on recent Linux distributions
Updates Gone Awry
Linux distributions with the latest daily updates are not uncommon, especially on home networks. In many cases, the home admin has enabled automatic updates and won't even notice the changes, unless an application happens to fail. In this article, I will look at a practical example in which VMware Server 2.0 refused to cooperate after the administrator updated the underlying operating system from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14.
History
The starting point for this tale is a working VMware Server [1] with 64-bit Fedora 13 (including a full set of updates) [2]. Besides various guests for test purposes, two virtual machines run on this hardware, and I can't do without either for very long. Fedora 14 had just been released, and my initial experience with other machines made me optimistic about risking a complete upgrade of my home Linux environment. All I needed to do was enable the new package repositories and launch the Yum [3] package manager.
Thanks to a lean operating system image and fast Internet access, the server had a freshly installed Fedora 14 just a couple of minutes (and one reboot) later. But, somehow I'd lost the connection to my VMware application. A quick inspection of the /var/log/messages file revealed the issue – the vmware-hostd process had crashed with a segmentation fault (Listing 1).
Listing 1
Segmentation Fault in vmware-hostd
01 Dec 6 13:30:08 virtual kernel: [ 175.894212] vmware-hostd[3870]: segfault at 2100001c4f ip 0000003c0cb32ad0 sp 00007f3889e9cb88 error 4 in
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