For months now I’ve not been able to get the VMware Server web interface working. At various points I’ve tried to debug it, looking in the log files, commenting various bits of the startup script out, running httpd directly, etc.

Turns out the startup script just runs in the wrong shell for Ubuntu. The default shell is /bin/sh, if this is changed to /bin/bash then every thing pops into life all of a sudden.

It’s always the small things.