FIX for VMware Remote Console on Fedora 16 (and Firefox Plugin)

Symptom: VMware Remote Console (and console plugin under Firefox) on Fedora 16 crashes with SIGSEGV (segfault) when it attempts a connection to a remote vCenter server. Traceback in /tmp/vmware-<username>/vmrc-<pid>.log shows lines like:

[...]

2012-02-29T09:37:32.117+10:00| vmrc| SymBacktrace[3] 00007fff9fbb8760 rip=00007f1de4ec2ee4 in function engine_unlocked_finish in object /lib64/libcrypto.so.10 loaded at 00007f1de4e1a000

Cause: Incompatibilities between VMware-provided libcrypto.so.0.9.8 and the Fedora-supplied libcrypto.so.1.0.0g (and libcrypto.so.0.9.8)

Fix: use LD_PRELOAD to ensure the VMware-provided libcrypto is loaded before the Fedora-supplied library

HOWTO:

1. myhost# mv /usr/lib/vmware-vmrc/vmware-vmrc /usr/lib/vmware-vmrc/vmware-vmrc.real
2. myhost# cat > /usr/lib/vmware-vmrc/vmware-vmrc << EoF
   #!/bin/sh
   export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/vmware-vmrc/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8/libcrypto.so.0.9.8
   /usr/lib/vmware-vmrc/bin/vmware-vmrc $*
   EoF
3. myhost# chmod 755 /usr/lib/vmware-vmrc/vmware-vmrc

At this point, starting either the Remote Console client directly, or by clicking on the console in the vCenter Flash web-based client should work

Message was edited by: colinprea - fix command-line in first command; add traceback and logfile reference