When installing vCloud Director the other day i ran into a strange problem. After uploading (using pscp.exe from a Windows based PC) the vCloud Directory binary file to the vCD cell /tmp directory i run the command:
./vmware-vcloud-director-5.1.1-868405.bin
The output usually tells me there are some missing RedHat packages but not this time. I received the following message:
Verifying RPM signatures…md5sum: vmware-vcloud-director-rhel-5.1.1-868405.x86_64.rpm: No such file or directory
./vmware-vcloud-director-5.1.1-868405.bin: line 455: [: !=: unary operator expected
ERROR: Installation cannot proceed because the following file(s) have invalid MD5 checksums:
vmware-vcloud-director-5.1.1-868405.x86_64.rpm
Please try downloading the installation files again and retry. If the problem persists please contact VMware Support.
So what is this all about, i have used the same installation procedure many times before but never seen this!
I recall i found the RedHat operating system having the wrong time, actually said 2014 instead of 2013. I changed it back after uploading the vCloud Directory binary to the vCD cell /tmp directory but before the installation.
So either the vCloud Directory binary was corrupted during the file upload process from my Windows PC or changing the time in the RedHat operating system caused this problem. I found it hard to believe the time change will cause this problem but i’m not sure and i have tried to reproduce the behavior twice without success.
I didn’t verify the MD5 checksum after receiving the error which would have been a good thing to do but i’ll definitely will next time using e.g. the RedHat operating system built in tool md5sum. An excellent post about how to verify VMware downloads was published at vNinja.net by Christian Mohn and can be found here
To solve the problem i uploaded the same binary file (using pscp.exe form the same Windows PC) once more and successfully installed the vCloud Directory software.