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john_willis
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

How to Fix - software update can't connect


Hello,

I downloaded VMware Player 5.0.2 for Windows x64 and installed it on Windows 7.

The automatic software update download appears to hang.


Clicking "Details" indicates it cannot connect to the update server "https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds " which is a non-standard URL.

I used a browser to go to https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds but all of the links lead to dead-ends.

However if you use the standard URL https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/ (with a "terminating" slash delimeter) the same directory listing appears, with working links.

There is at least one thread explaining how to manually extract and use the .iso files to install the virtual machine tools. It would be better if VMware Player handled this for the end user as designed.

The problem is in libcds.dll and can be corrected with a Hex Editor in Windows.

Example:

Download a Hex Editor like xvi32 (Google: http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delphi/freeware/xvi32/xvi32.htm#download ) extract and run.

Find the libcds.dll file ( "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\libcds.dll" ) and make a backup copy in case this fails. Drag and drop the original libcds.dll file on the xvi32 application window.

Xvi32 has a text search feature called "Search" (After clicking on search, click on "Find - Text string") then type [ softwareupdate ] click on [OK]

To the right of the main display, in the white grid, will be the ASCII representation of the URL https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds

Click on the box, in the white ASCII grid area, after the last letter in the URL 'http://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds' and type ' / ' ( forward slash - next to your right shift key, under ? ). Save the file.

Then restart the VMware Player.

Manually trigger a software update download ->

[Player] -> File -> Player Preferences -> Software Updates -> [Download All Components Now]

All of the virtual machine tools will begin to download and finish.

The downloaded packages will automatically extract and install the *.iso files where they belong.

The virtual machine tools menu option will now work from VMware Player for all virtual machines->

[Player] -> Manage -> VMware Tools Installation

If problems arise, you can stop VMware Player, and restore the libcds.dll file saved before the edit.

johnw.jpg

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1035392  - Knowledge Base - Installing VMware Tools in VMware Player


http://communities.vmware.com/message/2143946 - VMware Player 5 - Tools - "Cannot find component on update server..."

http://communities.vmware.com/message/2071061 - URL nonconformity

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1833330 - libcds.dll

arches-me2b.jpg
9 Replies
XWAVG
Contributor
Contributor

Even worked for VMware Workstation. Thanks.

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11Al
Contributor
Contributor

there isn't need for all this complicated procedure often useless, for fixing the problem. Just start VMWare Workstation with administrator privileges and the problem is solved.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Hello,

Current maintainer of CDS (Workstation/Player/Fusion's auto-update system) here. Hopefully I can shed some light.

Adding a terminating '/' to the URL won't affect CDS's operation. CDS uses GLib's g_build_path function to generate the URLs it queries. In short, this function takes several pieces of a path (e.g. 'a' 'b' 'c') and joins them with the path separating character supplied (e.g. 'a/b/c'). It specifically checks to ensure that only one instance of the path separator exists between each element of the path, so 'a/' '/b' 'c' will still return 'a/b/c'. You can confirm that the same URL is being queried for both cases by checking Player's log file (whose path is displayed in the "About" dialog): When the repository URL isn't terminated by a slash, the following log line appears when CDS has read the repository:

2014-06-09T18:36:56.373-07:00| player| I120: CDS: Fetching repository index from https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/index.xml

Versus the version with an additional slash at the end:

2014-06-09T18:39:57.598-07:00| player| I120: CDS: Fetching repository index from https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/index.xml

Now, as for why the links at https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds are broken in the browser versus the directory listing at https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/ working, it comes down to how browsers treat links embedded in a HTML document. Because these directory listings are statically-generated HTML files (you can see the same content if you visit https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/index.html), we've used relative links in these files. When a web browser encounters a relative link, it truncates the current page's URL until it hits a path separator and then inserts the link's content. For example, if you're viewing a web page located at http://example.com/some-page.html, and it contains a relative link to "other-page.html", the browser will assume that other-page.html is located at http://example.com/other-page.html and send a request as such. This is where the additional '/' comes in when viewing the CDS repository in your browser: the relative link to 'index.xml' is turned into the absolute URL https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/index.xml if there's no terminating slash in "https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds". If there is a terminating slash, though, the relative link is canonicalized as "https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/index.xml". This is only an issue when viewing the CDS content directly with a web browser, though, as CDS has no interaction with the directory listing files itself (they're there only for the occasional human that happens along them).

Lastly, I'll try to explain the nuances of a couple common connection error messages. This information only pertains to Workstation 10, Player 6, and Fusion 6 or older:

"Could not connect to the update server." - Returned when the operating system returned an error when CDS attempted to connect to the update server (e.g. similar to "destination host unreachable"), or when the SSL handshake with the CDS server fails, or when the hostname of the proxy given to Workstation/Player/Fusion couldn't be resolved.

"The connection to the update server timed out." - This one is fairly self-explanatory. This error is returned when we don't receive a response from the server in a short enough timeframe. This usually means that the connection was lost halfway through some operation.

Typically, both of these indicate a network connectivity issue; either the internet connectivity of your machine is having an issue, the CDS server's connectivity is having an issue, or somewhere in between.

VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2014 (which also comes with Player) as well as VMware Fusion Technology Preview 2014 have had their CDS error messages improved somewhat to provide clearer and more helpful errors when encountering software update/component download issues. For example, the above-mentioned "Could not connect to the update server." error is no longer returned for proxy resolution, and somewhat common and incredibly nondescript errors like "CDS internal client error (3033)" have been replaced by better messages.

PaulAnderson52
Contributor
Contributor

Hello,

What about this error connection message: "A certificate error occurred for the update server. Check your Internet settings or contact your system administrator". Internet works both on host and guest OS(win 7). How to fix this? I checked my Internet settings and they are fine, what's the next step? I wrote about this, here: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/481269

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Isoar
Contributor
Contributor

Well I don't understand why it's not supposed to work, but I can verify that it does work. Before it would just sit there saying 'connecting' forever. Now it goes straight to 'downloading' and everything works. Thank you John.

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salkindnul
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

I have the same problem in workstation 10.0.3 on windows 7, but I can not get software update to work using John's workaround.

Noticed that workstation tries to DNS resolve softwareupdate.vmware.com using a DNS server 172.20.10.1

This DNS server is not defined on my win7 host and it does not respond, could this be part of the problem?

Hardcoding IP for softwareupdate.vmware.com in win7 hostfile do fix the problem for me!

Niklas

BluePan
Contributor
Contributor

If you are using a proxy to connect to the internet, use proxy's IP. Don't use proxy domain name. I tested it on two different player v6 installations and it worked. It seems that VMwarePlayer fails to resolve domain names.

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computerguy7
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I got this update error too after downloading vmware player from:

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_player/6_0|PLAYER-604|produc...

do NOT use use the first download, use the second one.

VMware-player-6.0.4-2237854.exe - bad version

VMware-player-6.0.4-2249910.exe - good version

vmware should remove the first download link!!!!

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Oops, good catch. Only one of those builds was intended to be published (build number 2249910). We've removed the other from our site.

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