debian-7.8 box broken by VMWare Fusion 7.1.1 to 7.1.2 update

[RobbKistler]

Short story:

The debian-7.8 1.0.0 vagrant box uses has Linux kernel 3.2.65. Later distro updates of Debian 7.8 pull in kernel 3.2.68. This kernel has a change that breaks VMWareFusion’s hgfs host file system drivers on a few Linux distros, see this thread at communities.vmware.com.

This is fine as long as you don't update Debian, but...

VMWare “fixed” the hgfs problem in Fusion 7.1.2 with vmware tools 9.0.3. After updating Fusion, the vmware-tools automatically update. At this point, the updated hgfs driver fails to compile because it only works with kernel 3.2.68. This also breaks the vmware-tools automatic capability, which uses hgfs to get the new tools from the host.

The fix seems to be to update the chef/debian-7.8 box

1. Update Fusion to 7.1.2
2. Update the box vm to the latest version of debian 7.8 (new kernel): apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
3. Manually reinstall vmware-tools in the Box.

Once these updates are applied, the box seems to work fine if I downgrade to VMWare 7.1.1.

This issue probably applies to distros downstream from Debian, too.

[RobbKistler]

Maybe this is a dup of Issue 377

[cheeseplus]

We've rebuilt the boxes with the latest version @8a424e2900148bb8d732604844b4e18bce064d07

[RobbKistler]

Still doesn't work with VMWare Fusion 7.1.2 or Fusion 8.

[cheeseplus]

@RobbKistler just to confirm - this is the new box hosted out of the bento namespace https://atlas.hashicorp.com/bento/boxes/debian-7.8?

[RobbKistler]

Yes, bento/debian7.8 version v2.2.0
The symptom is the same -- stuck waiting for the HGFS driver to come up.

==> client: Waiting for HGFS kernel module to load...

[RobbKistler]

Root cause is still the same -- bad behavior in the vmware-tools updater. A newer version of Fusion triggers the vwware-tools to self-update, which then break against the kernel version in the Debian 7.8 image.

[RobbKistler]

I verified that the kernel version (3.2.68), and VMWare tools tries to install version 10.0.0.164 build-2977863 of vmware-tools.

The problem might be from 250efaa. The cleanup script removes the linux kernel headers and the compiler. This seems like a great thing to do, but the, but the vmware-tools need the headers and compiler to rebuild the hgfs module. The vmware-tools automatically update when there is a new version available -- from the Fusion 8 update, in this case.

I see this error in /var/log/vmware-tools-upgrader.log with a timestamp of the time I do "vagrant up":

WARNING: This program cannot compile any modules for the following reason(s)...

• This program could not find a valid path to the kernel headers of the running
  kernel. Please ensure that the header files for the running kernel are
  installed on this sytem.'

One option would be to leave the packages required by vmware tools (kernel headers, gcc, make, binutils). Another might be to configure vmware-tools to not auto-update.

[odilontalk]

@RobbKistler you can use: https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches

Works nice on VMWare Fusion 7.1.2 and Debian 8.2.

[cmluciano]

I'm seeing the same thing on Ubuntu-14.04 boxes at box patch 2.2.1

[cheeseplus]

2.2.2 was just recently released and should not have the issue.

[cmluciano]

👍 works well for me now :)