Wierd VMWare behavior

[Matthew Gillen]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Just a followup.
> This morning at home I powered up the laptop, logged in as me,
> started VMWare and powered on the Windows VM. I left the laptop powered
> on and plugged in in at work, and restarted the network to get a new IP
> address (10.). I was able to ping the outside world from the Windows
> VM.  
> 
> I then powered off the VM and received the same message. I then
> shutdown rebooted the laptop, logged in as my wife, started VMWare, but
> again the VM failed to power on:
> "Unable to change virtual machine power state: The
> "/usr/lib/vmware-server/bin/vmware.vmx" process did not start properly.
> Try running
> "/usr/lib/vmware-server/bin/vmware-vmx /var/lib/vmware-server/Virtual
> Machines/Windows XP Professional/Windows XP Professional.vmx" from the
> command line on the server. 
> 
> I did that both from an ssh -X login as well as from a terminal, but it
> appeared to hang. Don't know if it was trying popup a dialog or not,
> but there were no messages.

Is there a log file anywhere?  (like in /tmp)  That might have more
information about what specifically caused the failure.

Here's another idea:  what does your /etc/nsswitch.conf file look like?
Perhaps you're accidentally using NIS (or ldap, or whatever) at work, and the
user definitions in the passwd files have some overlap (ie different settings
for the same username).

Compare the results of
 $ getent passwd
at work and at home.  You might also do "getent group".

Matt

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