The linux-group at work is responsible for upgrading VMware-tools of all our virtual Linuxservers. Currently we
have about 350 servers running RHEL 4 and RHEL 5 so we need an effective way of doing this with as little manual work as possible.

I have recently tried to use Red Hat Satellite Server for automating this by scheduling remote execution
of vmware-config-tools.pl after the vmware-tools RPM has been upgraded.
This works at times, but not reliably. Several times I have encountered that vmware-config-tools.pl -d
hangs forever (usually killed after an hour as it bogs down the CPU).

I have used strace to attach to the pid of vmware-config-tools and the following output is repeated as long as the process is executing:

stat("/bin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0stat("/usr/bin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=36864, ...}) = 0stat("/sbin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=12288, ...}) = 0stat("/usr/sbin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=12288, ...}) = 0read(0, "", 4096) = 0stat("/bin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0stat("/usr/bin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=36864, ...}) = 0stat("/sbin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=12288, ...}) = 0stat("/usr/sbin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=12288, ...}) = 0read(0, "", 4096) = 0stat("/bin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0stat("/usr/bin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=36864, ...}) = 0stat("/sbin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=12288, ...}) = 0stat("/usr/sbin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=12288, ...}) = 0read(0, "", 4096) = 0stat("/bin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0stat("/usr/bin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=36864, ...}) = 0stat("/sbin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=12288, ...}) = 0stat("/usr/sbin/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=12288, ...}) = 0

Do you have any suggestions for what kind of issue I'm encountering here?

Thanks,

Erling