Hi all
I have a Linux server (Debian 3.1, kernel 2.6.8-2-686-smp) on which I've installed VMWare server. The server is configured with a serial console on ttyS0 to permit remote management - the kernel is booted with "console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty1" and GRUB is configured to use a serial console for its output. This has been entirely fuss free and works whether or not the serial console is connected, as it should.
VMWare server doesn't cope. It seems to attach to ttyS0 as its primary console. When I try to create a VM, it gets a SIGHUP (presumably due to accessing ttyS0), doesn't have a signal handler installed to deal with the signal, and exits. If I run vmware-serverd manually from a pty, it works fine.
This is a pretty serious issue, as Linux servers with serial consoles aren't exactly uncommon.