VMWare Web Access Can’t Login After Upgrading to Debian Lenny

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).