This one should be obvious but well, it wasn’t… When you upgrade to the latest Debian stable (Lenny at time of writing which was released 14 Feb 2009), it will upgrade PAM and a few other really important login-type modules. At the time it will tell you that you have to restart any services that use PAM or they mightn’t authenticate properly and offer to restart a number of services for you so everything seems happy.
Sadly, since VMWare isn’t installed as a Debian package, it’s not included in that list of services to reboot so it will suddenly stop allowing you to log in. The fix is to simply restart the vmware management services:
sudo /etc/init.d/vmware-mgmt restart
This won’t restart your VMs, just the web access and other management components. You can now log in to the web access console using the appropriate OS accounts (by default I think only root is enabled).
Kamil Maciejewski says:
Thanks man, you saved my day. I don’t know why after upgrading VMWare Server to the latest version web console dies all the time (every few days). I tried changing vmware-authd ports, and restarting xinet.d all the time, mostly after doing it a hundred times it works again for few days, but it’s really annoying. I even wrote a topic on vmware forums http://communities.vmware.com/message/1252886#1252886 but no-one answered. Thanks man, you rock!