After upgrading Firefox on my main workstation to a more up-to-date release (3.6), it turns out I can’t access the Webinterface of any of my VMware Servers. While some kind of glitch every now and then is to be expected from this “somewhat” buggy piece of sh… uhm, code – this time, logging with Firefox actually manages to crash the management application on the server itself. Yeah, that’s right – at that point you can’t even access it with another browser or the VIC until you kill the hostd and do a /etc/init.d/vmware-mgmt restart. It isn’t even some kind of ancient beta release, but 2.0.2 – the most recent release as of now. WTF?
According to the logs there appears to be some kind of SSL issue:
SSL Handshake on client connection failed.
Turns out Web Access can’t handle SSL3 and Firefox 3.6 has SSL2 disabled per default. Why this manages to crash an application on the server boggles my mind, but at least there’s an easy workaround until VMware manages to fix this:
Go to your about:config page and set security.enable.ssl2 from false to true.
That’s it, done. At least it worked for me – no more issues whatsoever.