The Second Drawer

I’ve been trying to set up vmware-server on feisty and had a problem - trying to install the .deb from canonical was failing with the following message:


Can't add port 902 (vmware-authd) to inetd.conf


Looking through the vmware-server.postinst it had the following line:

if ! netstat -l -Ainet | grep ':902' > /dev/null 2>&1 ; then
update-inetd --add '902 stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/vmware-authd vmware-authd'
else
echo "Can't add port 902 (vmware-authd) to inetd.conf"
exit 1
fi


Calling the netstat call again myself showed up the following:

tcp 0 0 localhost:902 *:* LISTEN


Obviously something was running on that port that is the vmware server. Nothing looked obvious from the process list, and a grep across my /etc directory didn’t show up anything defining that port, apart from the vmware-auth server itself and nmap just returned the info from /etc/services.

After slowly shutting down all my services I eventually discovered that famd was the culprit - which I don’t think is an ubuntu default, or at least not since edgy, but as I’ve been on an upgrade path I still have it installed. I shutdown famd and installed vmware and changed the vmware-auth port and all was good.

Note: when I originally started this post I was running Feisty - I’ve since upgraded to gutsy where there isn’t any vmware repository… so the point s moot.