Welcome back to my (almost) daily appointment with “What’s wrong with Fedora today?”.
At work, our servers are VMs on a VMware vSphere; we access them using SSH of course, but sometimes we need to use the remote console from the vSphere Web Client (that is a vmrc link). I upgraded my kernel (and many libraries) last week but since I don’t use vSphere that often, I didn’t noticed anything until a couple of days ago, when a RAM stick failed and our machines crashed, rebooting in emergency mode.
Usually you login, select your VM, click on Launch Remote Console and you’re done. Unfortunately I got this:
reason appLoader killed by signal 11 cmdline /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmrc executable /usr/lib/vmware/bin/appLoader [...] os_release Fedora release 26 (Twenty Six) kernel 4.12.11-300.fc26.x86_64
I tried to open the vmrc link again, keeping an eye on dmesg and, immediately after launching the console, a wild segmentation fault message appears:
vmrc[7877]: segfault at 68b0 ip 00000000000068b0 sp 00007fff637045b8 error 14 in appLoader[55b36859c000+b6000]
I also found this error in a log file located in /tmp/vmware-root:
2017-09-15T09:09:25.630+02:00| appLoader| W115: Unable to load dependencies for /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libvmrc.so/libvmrc.so
2017-09-15T09:09:25.630+02:00| appLoader| W115: Unable to execute /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmrc
Google took me to this post on the ArchWiki, providing a workaround for this issue:
cp -r /usr/lib/vmware-installer/2.1.0/lib/lib/libexpat.so.0 /usr/lib/vmware/lib
cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libz.so.1
mv libz.so.1 libz.so.1.old
ln -s /usr/lib64/libz.so.1 .
Copying the libraries and creating a symlink fixed all the problems mentioned above and vmrc links open using the VMware Remote Console.