Back in the June 20th code refresh we changed how vmware-guestd relays versioning information to the host. Now, one can now set a key/value pair in tools.conf which will cause the open-vm-tools to "opt-out" of VMware's Tools upgrading infrastructure. At the time I don't think we advertised this change loudly, but we should have: ALL OPEN-VM-TOOLS PACKAGES SHOULD MAKE USE OF THIS MECHANISM. I've added a paragraph describing the key/value pair to the open-vm-tools packaging wiki (in the vmware-guestd section). More details follow.
The VMware Tools have an "internal version" which is broadcast by vmware-guestd to the VMX, which in turn, broadcasts it to our hosted UIs and to clients of the VI SDK. This version is bumped prior to every product release, and generally represents the "newness" of a particular Tools release. Clients outside the VMX will use this version to determine whether the Tools are to be upgraded, using either the VMware Tools auto-upgrading mechanism or the traditional manual upgrading mechanism (where the user must mount an ISO image in the guest, extract the Tools from it, and run a script). Unfortunately, these clients don't understand open-vm-tools or distro packages, and so they won't know to make use of tools like yum or apt to a) check for the availability of new open-vm-tools, and b) upgrade existing open-vm-tools. Until we address these shortcomings, we need a way to disable VMware-induced Tools upgrades, and so we cooked up this "opt-out" switch in vmware-guestd to do just that. It's very simple: instead of broadcasting the actual Tools internal version, vmware-guestd instead broadcasts the largest internal version possible. In newer VMware products this value has been special cased to represent open-vm-tools that clients should ignore, and in older products it'll appear to be the newest possible Tools, which will fool clients into thinking the Tools are up-to-date. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ open-vm-tools-devel mailing list open-vm-tools-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/open-vm-tools-devel
