Unconditional Exec on Ubuntu 13.04

[hgoldman]

When running this under Ubuntu 13.04 then we constantly see this when executing puppet:

notice: /Stage[main]/Vmwaretools::Kernel_upgrade/Exec[vmware_config_tools]/returns: executed successfully

What would be nice would be to make it conditional so it only executes once.

[whiteadam]

Hi Henrick,

Check out this link: #9

I had the same issues, but it turned out to be an error where I had to install build-essential, then re-install vmware-tools.

I also believe that the code was fixed last week, so if you could pull a fresh version, that might repair the error.

[hgoldman]

Unfortunately it wasn't about build essential.

The real problem is that Ubuntu 13.04 seems to be partially supported by Vmware tools. So it's really not a plugin bug but rather vmware tools issue.

In addition to installing build-essential and linux-headers-$(uname -r) it didn't see the kernel headers out of the box. No matter what I do then it couldn't find the kernel headers as it should.

From http://communities.vmware.com/thread/446302?start=0&tstart=0
it works by doing:

sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/linux/version.h

Furthermore the vmci driver is not compatible with the kernel headers so there is a workaround to patch it too:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2050666

Long story made short then this whole problem is a vmware issue and not related to this plugin. For obvious reasons it would be nice to enhance the debugging from the plugin itself because it wasn't really clear that it didn't install successfully. Without manually trying to install vmware tools it wouldn't be possible to see that something was missing.

[craigwatson]

@henrikgoldman thanks for the report, I'll add Ubuntu 13.04 to the "unsupported O/S" list and also add a Notify to the code to warn if you run on 13.04. This should be released in the next few days (in Boston on business at the moment).

@whiteadam thanks for the assist :)

Marking this as "invalid" and will close when I've released the fix - please let me know if you'd like anything more :)

[hgoldman]

I further found a follow up on this whole issue which confirms what I wrote:

http://blogs.vmware.com/guestosguide/2013/04/ubuntu-13-04.html

So I'm happy to see that it wasn't actually taken out of the blue and I was correct in my findings.

As the article says then the VMCI driver won't compile out of the box for now even with ESXi v5.1 Update 1. I guess they will fix that in some future version.

[craigwatson]

I've now released v0.1.1 - the module now hard-fails if run on 13.04 (aka Raring) - unfortunately I don't have time at present to delve into the KB articles and fully debug the issue.

Closing the issue for now, feel free to re-open if necessary.