VMWare: “Failed to create named-pipe directory” error
This post was written on May 30, 2007 at, or around 3:09 am by Drew. This post is composed of 266 words from the English language and currently has 8 comments to its name. Additionally, this article is tagged under Applications, Security, Software, Sys Admin, The Notebook, Tips, UNIX/Linux, VMWare, Workaround and you can trackback to this article using this link. This post was last updated on Apr 4, 2008. Enough talk, carry on.
Have you ever received the Failed to create named-pipe directory error message via the vmware-mui error log files, and not able to access the VMWare Management Interface? If so, here’s the fix.
The error message at hand is the following:
/var/log/vmware-mui/error_log
[Mon Oct 2 08:37:46 2006] [error] ModVmdb load: Address of ModVmdb_InitCore: 0xb7c745a0
[Mon Oct 2 08:37:46 2006] [error] Failed to create named-pipe directory: /var/run/vmware//httpd/3854: No such file or directory
[Mon Oct 2 08:37:46 2006] [error] VMWARE PANIC: \nNOT_IMPLEMENTED F(4023):707
[Mon Oct 2 08:37:46 2006] [error] Panic: Could not allocate temporary context.
I believe I have only seen this issue with Ubuntu systems. I don’t know if this is a bug or not, but it sure was bugging me. I also believe other people have resolved this, but I’m just going to put my idea out there just in case someone likes the way I choose to resolve this issue myself. I decided to create the /var/run/vmware/httpd directory and then change the ownership to www-data (Apache user for Apache default in Ubuntu). Then, I change the permissions to read, write, execute for the owner (www-data), and no other user can touch it, which is a good choice of security.
Here’s the fix:
BASH
mkdir /var/run/vmware/httpd
chown www-data /var/run/vmware/httpd
chmod 700 /var/run/vmware/httpd
Let me know if you have another work around, or maybe this doesn’t fix your system; if so, let’s talk.
Discussion always soothes thy heart.
Hey Brian,
Glad you got it working again. Let me know if you run into any other troubles.
Regards,
Drew
Worked as prescribed, thanks! Only difference for me was owner had to be nobody:nobody on RHEL4.
Hello,
also got this error.
Tried to fix it according to your suggestions.
Didn’t work.
Directory /var/run/vmware/httpd does exist with the appropriate owner and access rights.
Running CentOS 4.4
any clue?
I have modified the script /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware and i have inserted of the beginning of script
if [ ! -e /var/run/vmware/httpd ];
then
mkdir /var/run/vmware/httpd;
fi
chown www-data /var/run/vmware/httpd
chmod 700 /var/run/vmware/httpd
if the directory don’t exist it’s create… but if exist for security I chanche the permission of directory.
Thanks for the suggestion & i’m sorry for my orrible english