Bug 1715405

Summary:	libnsl-2.28-42.el8.x86_64.rpm should be installed by default OS installation in order to support ovftool/Workstation
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8	Reporter:	Wenjing Tan <tanwj>
Component:	libnsl2	Assignee:	Matej Mužila <mmuzila>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Kaleem <ksiddiqu>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	8.0	CC:	databases-maint, ellingsw+29044, hhorak, jsavanyo, pkubat, ruckc
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	8.1
Hardware:	x86_64
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	If docs needed, set a value
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Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2019-08-21 12:05:31 UTC	Type:	Bug
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Embargoed:

Description Wenjing Tan 2019-05-30 09:24:43 UTC

Description of problem:
An unknown error is reported when you attempt to perform the following operations on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 host: Upload a virtual machine to vSphere. Download a virtual machine from vSphere. Import an OVA or OVF file into Workstation Pro. Export a virtual machine to an OVA or OVF file

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
8.0, 8.1

How reproducible:
100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install rhel8 by default
2. Install Workstation 15.1 on rhel8
3. Open a terminal and try typing 'ovftool -v'
OR:
4. Launch Workstation and try to import/export/upload/download VM

Actual results:
After step 3, /usr/lib/vmware-ovftool/ovftool.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libnsl.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

After step 4, it prompted 'unknown error'. Workstation UI told the user to check ovftool log, but no ovftool log was existing for ovftool was not loaded.


Expected results:
No error happened.

Additional info:
1) After I manually installed the libnsl package(libnsl-2.28-42.el8.x86_64.rpm) on rhel8.0 host os, ovftool loaded successfully, upload/download and import/export VM also succeeded.
2) I noticed another libnsl2-1.2.0-2.20180605git4a062cf.el8.x86_64 was installed by default, but it did not work with ovftool.
3) Vmware has an internal bug 2339061 to track this issue.

Comment 1 Matej Mužila 2019-05-30 13:45:30 UTC

Hi,

this is probably a problem of VMware Workstation 15.1, as long as it does not require/install correct dependencies (the libnsl package).

Comment 2 Wenjing Tan 2019-06-21 08:43:33 UTC

But, using RHEL 7.4, we need not install additional package to run Workstation well. This is a regression from my point of view.

Comment 3 John Savanyo 2019-06-26 04:12:42 UTC

Can this get resolved in 8.1?

Comment 4 Steven W. Elling 2019-07-16 05:39:11 UTC

In my case, I was trying to perform a vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 - 6.5 upgrade from a Fedora 29 workstation and was getting the following in both the GUI and CLI VCSA Installer: 


error: probeOvf unexpected error: Error: Invalid XML: <data>
-----

While trying to run the ovftool from the vSphere ISO (VMware-VCSA-all-6.5.0-14020092.iso), I discovered the same "libnsl.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" error.

Fedora 29 has libnsl2-1.2.0, which contains /usr/lib64/libnsl.so.2.0.0, and older versions are not available.

I was able to work around the "Invalid XML" and .so errors by symlinking /usr/lib64/libnsl.so.2.0.0 to /tmp/vcsa/libnsl.so.1 then running the GUI VCSA Installer as follows:

cd /mnt/tmp00/vcsa-ui-installer/lin64/
/mnt/tmp00/vcsa-ui-installer/lin64/
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/tmp/vcsa ./installer


YMMV

Comment 5 ruckc@yahoo.com 2019-08-19 00:23:59 UTC

I believe this is an ovftool issue as it doesn't package itself in a proper rpm, therefore unless the installer ensures the dependencies are present, it has no way to know if the necessary depedencies are present.  In my opinion its an improvement as unnecessary packages shouldn't be loaded by default.

Comment 6 Honza Horak 2019-08-21 12:05:31 UTC

I think the comment #5 is correct, we should not change packages set that are installed by default, just to make software that does not handle dependencies properly working. I'm closing this bug NOTABUG now.