VMWare: “Failed to create named-pipe directory” error

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Have you ever received the Failed to create named-pipe directory error message via the vmware-mui error log files, and not able to access the VMWare Management Interface? If so, here’s the fix.

The error message (/var/log/vmware-mui/error_log) at hand is the following:

[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] ModVmdb load: Address of ModVmdb_InitCore: 0xb7c745a0
[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] Failed to create named-pipe directory: /var/run/vmware//httpd/3854: No such file or directory
[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] VMWARE PANIC: nNOT_IMPLEMENTED F(4023):707
[Mon Oct  2 08:37:46 2006] [error] Panic: Could not allocate temporary context.

I believe I have only seen this issue with Ubuntu systems. I don’t know if this is a bug or not, but it sure was bugging me. I also believe other people have resolved this, but I’m just going to put my idea out there just in case someone likes the way I choose to resolve this issue myself. I decided to create the /var/run/vmware/httpd directory and then change the ownership to www-data (Apache user for Apache default in Ubuntu). Then, I change the permissions to read, write, execute for the owner (www-data), and no other user can touch it, which is a good choice of security.

Here’s the fix:

mkdir /var/run/vmware/httpd
chown www-data /var/run/vmware/httpd
chmod 700 /var/run/vmware/httpd

Let me know if you have another work around, or maybe this doesn’t fix your system; if so, let’s talk.