Installing player from a non interactive shell fails "/dev/tty: No such device or address"

[grantstreet]

I have the following issue installing vmware player 2.5 from a standard rpm on a standard RHEL5 platform.

It installs ok when the running shell has access to /dev/tty, but I have a scripted configuration that I run from /etc/rc.local that tries to install the VMware-Player rpm.

The rpm looks to install fine and successfully but the vm* files are not installed.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Download VMware-Player rpm version 2.5.0-118166 and put the file somewhere eg /tmp

2. Put the following line in your /etc/rc.local "rpm -Uvh /tmp/VMware-Player* >/tmp/rpm.out 2>&1"

3. Uninstall any existing vmware or vmware player software

4. reboot

5. After reboot rpm -q VMware-Player returns that it's installed

6. Look at the /tmp/rpm.out file. error /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.27389: line 6: /dev/tty: No such device or address

7. Remove player with rpm -ev VMware-Player

8. run the same script "sh /etc/rc.local"

9. The vmware files are now installed and different output is generated in /tmp/rpm.out... includes

Extracting VMware Installer...done.

Installing VMware Installer 1.0

Copying files...

Configuring...

Installing VMware Player 2.5.0

Copying files...

Configuring...

Installing VMware Player 2.5.0

Copying files...

Configuring...

Installation was successful

I have checked the documentation, FAQ and the forums and they do not bring up anything relevent.

looking at the rpm post install script it redirects /dev/tty to stdin. Is there a reason for this?

Has anyone been able to work arround it?

Is this likely to get fixed?

How do I submit a bug for this?

Message was edited by: grantstreet

Message was edited by: grantstreet

[nick432]

Yup, that's a bug. I checked the RPM post install script for the RPM which shows:

TERM=dumb VMWARE_SKIP_RPM_UNINSTALL=1 /var/cache/vmware/VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.i386.bundle \

--required --console < /dev/tty

Apparently whoever made the RPM didn't think about doing installs/upgrades automatically through cron (when you wouldn't have a tty). How do we go about filing a bug report again?

[lgh]

It's still broken in VMware-Player-2.5.2-156735. And that's on top of breaking the rpm installation method - 2.0.2 was a proper rpm, and 2.5.2 installs and then

executes the bundle installation script. When it fails (as per this topic), the rpm is still installed, so there's no telling the installation failed.