tzlee.com/blog

Tag: VMware Server

  • New glibc in CentOS 5.4 breaks VMware Server 2.x

    I’ve been puzzled for quite a while now why the web UI keeps crashing on one of my VMware servers here, and I finally decided to kick my lazy ass and get down to work.

    I found out that it was the vmware-hostd process that hosts the web UI ports (HTTP on TCP/8222 and HTTPS on TCP/8333). A quick search on Google gave me just what I was looking for.

    So it seems the new glibc version in CentOS 5.4 breaks VMware Server 2. If you’ve already upgraded your server, here’s how you can downgrade glibc:

    • Go to /etc/yum.repos.d
    • Make a copy of CentOS-Base.repo to CentOS-5.3-Base.repo
    • Edit CentOS-5.3-Base.repo and rename all the headings in the [brackets], e.g. [base] -> [base53]
    • Do a search and replace all $releasever with 5.3
    • Save the file
    • Run yum clean all then run yum downgrade glibc glibc-common
    • You’ll also need to re-run vmware-config.pl
    • After the downgrade is done, edit /etc/yum.conf and add exclude=glibc glibc-common glibc-devel glibc-headers glibc-utils nscd on a new line to avoid future update issues, at least until VMware decides to fix it.