No network connections to or from VMWare guest when building

[Sean Mackrory]

I apologize for my very vague question, but I'm really just out of ideas for what to investigate at this point. I'm trying to create a CentOS guest using a Kickstart file loaded over Packer's embedded web-server. This works flawlessly when using the VirtualBox provisioner, however when I try a practically identical configuration for the VMWare provisioner, the guest is unable to download the Kickstart file. I've looked at the URL it's trying to retrieve, and the IP matches that of my host on the VMWare NAT network, and the port matches Packer says it's using for the HTTP server. When I download the URL from my host, I get a valid kickstart file. If I take over the OS install and do it manually, I'm able to download other remote files (like the CentOS .img file) and finish the installation successfully. The provisioner will then recognize that SSH is available and start provisioning, but fail because it's unable to upload the shell script. I've also tried switching the VM from the default "NAT" configuration to a "host-only" network and restarting the VM before Packer tries executing the boot command via VNC, but I only end up running into the same problem.

So the vague question: what could possibly be the problem, and where could I look for more details? There's no indication of anything going wrong in any VMWare's output that I know of, nor in Packer's -debug output. Is there a specific way the vmware network needs to be configured for this to work that may not always be the default?

[Jason Beranek]

Sean,

What platform are you running on?

I've seen similar behavior when using a VPN connection (using Cisco AnyConnect) on Windows. However, in that case the URL in the boot command won't even load on the host because the network adapter itself is disabled by the VPN. This only affected VMware Workstation, and not VirtualBox. Likely because they handle that networking in different ways.

-Jason

On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 12:11 PM, Sean Mackrory <mackr...@gmail.com> wrote:

I apologize for my very vague question, but I'm really just out of ideas for what to investigate at this point. I'm trying to create a CentOS guest using a Kickstart file loaded over Packer's embedded web-server. This works flawlessly when using the VirtualBox provisioner, however when I try a practically identical configuration for the VMWare provisioner, the guest is unable to download the Kickstart file. I've looked at the URL it's trying to retrieve, and the IP matches that of my host on the VMWare NAT network, and the port matches Packer says it's using for the HTTP server. When I download the URL from my host, I get a valid kickstart file. If I take over the OS install and do it manually, I'm able to download other remote files (like the CentOS .img file) and finish the installation successfully. The provisioner will then recognize that SSH is available and start provisioning, but fail because it's unable to upload the shell script. I've also tried switching the VM from the default "NAT" configuration to a "host-only" network and restarting the VM before Packer tries executing the boot command via VNC, but I only end up running into the same problem.

So the vague question: what could possibly be the problem, and where could I look for more details? There's no indication of anything going wrong in any VMWare's output that I know of, nor in Packer's -debug output. Is there a specific way the vmware network needs to be configured for this to work that may not always be the default?

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[Sean Mackrory]

Thanks for the input, Jason. I'm running on OpenSUSE 12.3, and I was originally using a VPN but ruled that out this morning - I still see the problem on a vanilla ethernet connection.

[Nick Owen]

Did you ever figure this out?  I'm seeing this same thing.  Centos on VMware work station. I can grab the kickstart file over http from the host.

[Nick Owen]

For posterity:  I changed HTTPIP to the correct IP.  A bit of a kludge, but works for now building both vmware and vbox images.