Cannot install VMWare tools

[serpi]

Hi,

we have an ESXi Server, just upgraded from ESXi 4.1u1 to 5.0.

There is an Linux VM running but I cannot install VMWare Tools on it (this wasn't even possible with 4.1U1 and the same error is now on 5.0).

It's (AFAIK) an older Ubuntu 32 Bit machine, "uname -a" gives "Linux xxx 2.6.15-28-server #1 SMP Tue Mar 13 21:09:03 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux".

There's no X installed, shell only, updating Linux is not an option.

When running the tar.gz installer it's running for some time, but when running "vmware-config-tools.pl"  it stop's with the error "Could not find Parent Node...".

The last output of the script is

-----

make -C $PWD SRCROOT=$PWD\. \

    MODULEBUILDDIR= postbuild

make[1]: Entering directory '/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmblock-only'

make[1]: 'postbuild' is up to date.

make[1]: Leaving directory '/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmblock-only'

cp -f vmblock.ko ./../vmblock.o

make: Leaving directory '/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmblock-only'

No X install found.

Could not find Parent Node...

-----

On ESX 3.5 there was no error installing VMWare Tools.

We were running the machine on ESXi4.1U1 with the ESX3.5 MWare tools, but now I lost the network connections after a reboot (I think because the old VMWare tools are uninstalled).

Any ideas how I can get the new VMWare tools installed?

Thanks & Ciao,

Alfred Schwarz

[serpi]

OK, after fiddling around with our Linux specialist we found then problem.

In the vmware-tools-config.pl is a subroutine "get_udev_tags".

There it uses the command "udevinfo -q path /dev/sda" on out machine to find scsi, which gives as result "/block/sda".

Here it calls "udevinfo -a -p /block/sda" and searches for the string "{vendor}=="VMware" which is found.

But not it looks for a line

"if ($txt =~ m/^'(.*?)':/s) { " for a special string at the beginning of a line, but this is not returned, instead it returnes

"looking at the device chain at '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:10.0/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0':"

So we changed the line to "if ($txt =~ m/'(.*?)':/s) {" (removing the "^" which told to search for ' at the beginng of the line) and the script worked!

Well, I think it's not easy to support all that kinds of Linux out there...

Thanks anyway,

Alfred Schwarz

[chrwei]

worked for me too, thanks for finding and posting the solution!

[mwilkinson]

Nice! This worked for me as well. Running on vSphere 5.5 trying to breathe life back into a Fedora Core 4 VM.

[gcarelli]

It worked. Thanks! Reviving a FC4 also over here.