Guest Customization on Ubuntu 12.04 Fails

Posted on 2 mins read

I came across an issue today – trying to deploy a Ubuntu Precise VM from a template and applying a customization setting to the VM – with default DHCP configuration.

These are the errors I was getting

deploy error

So first up the second error message is wrong – because the log file should not be but rather /var/log/vmware-inc/toolsDeployPkg.log

Going into the log file on the VM I saw the following.

less /var/log/vmware-imc/toolsDeployPkg.log

ERROR: Fatal error occurred during customization !! Customization halted.  
ERROR: Error : Could not create file /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf! at /tmp/.vmware/linux/deploy/scripts/Utils.pm line 475.  
INFO: Return code is 252.  
Customization process returned with error.  
Deployment result = 252  
Setting generic error status in vmx.  
Transitioning from state INPROGRESS to state ERRORED.  
ENTER STATE ERRORED  
EXIT STATE INPROGRESS  
Setting deploy error: Deployment failed. The forked off process returned error code.  
Deployment failed. The forked off process returned error code.  
Wait before set enable-nics stats in vmx.  
Trying to connect network interfaces, attempt 1  
Got VMX response 'queryNicsSupported'  
Got VMX response 'disconnected'  
Got VMX response 'connected'  
The network interfaces are connected on 1 second  
Launching cleanup.  
Command to exec : /bin/rm  
sizeof ProcessInternal is 32  
Returning, pending output  
Returning, pending output  
Process exited normally after 0 seconds, returned 0  
No more output  
No more output  
Customization command output:  
Deploy error: Deployment failed. The forked off process returned error code.  
Package deploy failed in DeployPkg\_DeployPackageFromFile  
## Closing log

A quick look on Google brought me to this article (in Spanish) describing a similar problem – but with a Debian VM.

The problem is that the VMware customization script is trying to access a path which does not exist.

/etc/dhcp3

Solution is to change the template from which you are deploying and create a soft-link to avoid the error.

ln -s /etc/dhcp /etc/dhcp3

Convert the VM back to a template, deploy a new VM with the same configuration..

And all is fine and dandy!

working