VMware Server blocked but no AVCs

[Eric Paris]

On Sat, 2009-02-21 at 12:33 +0000, Arthur Dent wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I use VMware Server on my F9 box for running other OSs in a virtualised
> environment. 
> 
> I used to use the VMware-server-1.0.* range, but recently upgraded to
> VMware-server-2.0.0. This version has a strange web interface rather
> than operating as an individual application as before. The interface
> loads and presents a log-on screen.
> 
> It fails here with any attempt to log in to the server met with the
> error:
> "The server is not responding. Please check that the server is running
> and accepting connections."
> 
> The strange thing is:
> There are *NO* AVCs
> It does NOT work in permissive mode
> It DOES work when selinux is *disabled*
> 
> It also causes the system to hang when shutting down the PC.
> 
> Does anyone know of a workaround or fix, or do I need to revert to v.
> 1.0.7 ?

It's apparently a problem that vmware tries to used PAM multithreaded,
but PAM is not multithread safe.  If you have selinux off pam takes one
code path that happens to work, if it's on, it takes another and
explodes.  I don't think we have any answer of than downgrade vmware or
turn off selinux until vmware fixes their problem...

-Eric