guest failure to shutdown / reboot

[Edward N. H. <ope...@ne...>]

On my system (pfsense 1.2.3 which is based on an old version of FreeBSD,
running on vmware ESXi 4.0u1) I installed the Open-VM-Tools package (package
ver 167859) via web interface, but I don't know which version of
open-vm-tools that is.  

 

Rebooted.  My vmtoolsd is running.  The rc.d scripts seem to work fine
during bootup.  The kldstat shows vmmemctl.ko, vmxnet.ko, vmblock.ko, and
vmhgfs.ko loaded into the kernel.

 

But my host OS cannot shutdown/reboot the guest OS.  (And I don't know what
else it can't do.)

 

I don't know what the cause of the problem is, but ps -ax shows me:

/usr/local/bin/vmtoolsd -c /usr/local/share/vmware-tools/tools.conf -p
/usr/local/lib/open-vm-tools/plugins/vmsvc

and I noticed the conf file doesn't exist.  This seems suspicious.

 

I can't seem to find any documentation anywhere, indicating what should go
inside that file?  But I'm not sure I should be sticking anything in that
file...

 

I enabled logging, issued the guest shutdown command from the host, and I
got this in the log:

[Jan 15 21:19:45.931] [   debug] [powerops] State change: OS_Halt

[Jan 15 21:19:45.960] [   debug] [powerops] State change complete, success =
0.

 

Nothing happened.  But at least I know the guest got the signal...  And I
don't know enough about open-vm-tools to figure out what I should look at
next.  Like ...  

 

When the guest gets that signal, what gets it?  Does the signal go directly
to vmtoolsd?

Does vmtoolsd then launch some shutdown command, which is actually failing?
What is that command?