ESXi says open-vm-tools are installed but not running

[hwprinz]

Describe the bug

Hello,

How can i troubleshoot, why the tools are not started or how do i fix they start after reboot.
because they are not starting at current when i do a reboot.
unfortunately the system (debian 11) has no internet connection, so i can't re-install them 'just so..'

Any help appreciated...
Thanks

Reproduction steps

Expected behavior

Start automatically after reboot

Additional context

[PaTHml]

Exact versions of the debian image installed and the open-vm-tools packages it comes with would be needed.

That sounds like an issue encountered with Ubuntu (debian related) years ago.

The open-vm-tools service will log to a few different logfiles in /var/log/vmware-.log
The vmware-vmsvc.log (vmware-vmsvc-root.log) is the file pattern for the primary open-vm-tools service.

If the service startup did not go that far, things like syslog or journal might have something about the startup issue (systemctl traces).

Lets start with answering is it running or not?
On a terminal as root:
$ systemctl --no-pager status open-vm-tools

The output might have hint about a termination reason or a configuration issue.

$ systemctl --no-pager status vgauth

Just to be thorough.

The log files might have more info. If no log file, it did not progress far enough to initialize logging. It is then more likely a config issue.

If the service is not running we can try running the service manually from a terminal:
$ /usr/bin/vmtoolsd

Let it go for a while (1 to 2 minutes should do) then stop it. Try "kill -15 " first, if it does not exit within a minute use "kill -9 ".

If it ran this long there should be logs, and it's likely a systemctl unit configuration causing the issue
If the service can be started manually, then the issue could be in the systemctl unit configuration for the open-vm-tools package provided with the distro release.