Greetings,
I'm developing a software-appliance that supports VMWare. however since this is a security product - the whole operating system (kernel+packages) were customized. Although it's debian-based - i don't have APT , GCC, ...
My goal is to add support for VMware Tools .
I found an excellent article about building VMwareTools for such environment (KB 1898 : "Compiling and Deploying VMware Tools in Virtual Machines Without GCC" , http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1898) . It seems that the solution is to build it on an "R&D" machine (with GCC+kernel-headers) and re-pack the vmware-tools distribution with the new files .
However although i followed all the steps to build my "own" distribution vmtools package , when i try to install it on the target appliance - the installation doesn't recognize my "pre-built" modules and i am asked to provide GCC ...
The installation-script that i'm trying to run is
# ./vmware-config-tools.pl --prebuilt
and it seems that it fails on internal "module validation":
/usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin32/vmware-modconfig-console --pbm-available vmmemctl -- -l "/usr/lib/vmware-tools/"
Since i have the module and i can load it manually - i wonder if anyone knows why it might fail...
Now, i managed to install the VMWare tools using a "tricky dirty workaround" : manually copy the modules to "/lib/modules/.../misc" and add some required lines to "/etc/vmware-tools/locations" . this seems to solves all my problem but this is a hack and i really don't like it.
So please...experts or VMware developers ... any idea why this "--pbm-available" cannot recognize my system ?
Note that i added the "objects" directory and the "properties" as required so there's got to be something non-documented...
tnx,
ZFerentz
