VMware Server’s httpd

jamesoff — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:03:59 +0000

After a brief powercut at work this morning the machine running VMware Server restarted. It came up fine, but wouldn’t start the VMware Apache server for the web interface. In /var/log/vmware-mui/error_log it was complaining:

[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] ModVmdb load: Address of ModVmdb_InitCore: 0xb7c745a0\n
[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] Failed to create named-pipe directory:
  /var/run/vmware//httpd/3854: No such file or directory\n
[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] VMWARE PANIC: \nNOT_IMPLEMENTED F(4023):707\n
[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] Panic: Could not allocate temporary context.\n

This is apparently a known problem on Ubuntu (which is what I’m running it on), and someone came up with this fix on the VMware community forums. However, I’m not entirely happy with setting a directory to 777 so instead I created the httpd directory and changed the owner to www-data, which is who the VMware Apache server runs as. That meant I could set the permissions to 700.

# mkdir /var/run/vmware/httpd
# chown www-data /var/run/vmware/httpd
# chmod 700 /var/run/vmware/httpd

Seems to be working fine now. I didn’t modify the startup script as suggested in the forum post yet, so I’ll see when I next restart this machine if I need to do that. (Possibly Ubuntu clears /var/run when it starts, which would explain it.)

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VMware Server’s httpd