Installing VMTools using VSphere fails

ang

I didn't want to use Open-VM-Tools because I didn't like the way it shows up as Unmanaged in VSphere.

So I tried to follow the instructions found here, grabbing the "pkg_add -r compat6x-i386"

The error I'm getting is:

[2.0-RC1][admin@pfsense.localdomain]/tmp/vmware-tools-distrib(30): ./vmware-install.pl
ELF binary type "0" not known.
ELF binary type "0" not known.
ELF binary type "0" not known.
VMware Tools 8.3.7 build-341836 for Linux will not install on the operating
system you are running. Please be sure you install the version of VMware Tools
that is appropriate for your operating system.

Execution aborted.

I'm running 2.0 RC1:

[2.0-RC1][admin@pfsense.localdomain]/tmp/vmware-tools-distrib(31): uname -a
FreeBSD pfsense.localdomain 8.1-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE-p2 #0: Sat Feb 26 15:04:52 EST 2011 sullrich@FreeBSD_8.0_pfSense_2.0-snaps.pfsense.org:/usr/obj.pfSense/usr/pfSensesrc/src/sys/pfSense.8 i386

It's running as a virtual machine on ESX 4.1

I am not sure whether I'm attempting the impossible, or if there's just something obvious I'm doing wrong that I've overlooked. I'd appreciate any help, I'm very new at this. Thanks!

jimp

Is there something specific that the Open VM Tools doesn't do besides just show "unmanaged"? I haven't seen anyone having any actual problems with it aside from the message displayed there.

ang

Thanks for getting back to me!

Using Open-VM-Tools works, to the extent that it is showing the IP address and hostname, and I can gracefully shut down from the Vsphere client.

However if it's unmanaged, I can't update tools from Vsphere, or see if the tools are out of date.

jimp

Right, because they aren't the tools it knows about, and they would break things if you updated them that way. That's why the package exists. :-)