Failed to launch the MKS client: The system cannot find the file specified

Evening troubleshooting…
I was sitting on #vmware irc channel today and i was interested in problem that one person had. He had fresh installation of esxi 5.1 on a brand new box, few vms, but for some reason he could not connect to vm remote console using vsphere client. We went through a lot of checking, many KBs and so on and on, cables, cards, nics, fw, dns… still nothing.
What we did at the end is that we were watching with ‘ tail -f /var/log/hostd.log ‘ the log, while he tried to open the console. And we finally saw :

2013-08-06T20:55:00.177Z [47696B90 verbose ‘Default’] Timed out reading between HTTP requests. : Read timeout after approximately 50000ms. Closing stream TCP(local=127.0.0.1:8309, peer=127.0.0.1:50050)
2013-08-06T20:55:00.177Z [470E2B90 error ‘Solo.HttpSvc.HTTPService’] Failed to read request; stream: TCP(), error: N7Vmacore16TimeoutExceptionE(Operation timed out)
2013-08-06T20:55:02.061Z [47738B90 verbose ‘SoapAdapter’] Responded to service state request

So there had to be something with the connection/port.

vSphere client log was showing:

2013-08-06T15:07:51.557-05:00| vmrc| I120: VMClient_ConnectMksClientEx – connecting the MKS client
2013-08-06T15:07:51.557-05:00| vmrc| I120: VMClientConnectMKSClientEx
2013-08-06T15:07:51.558-05:00| vmrc| I120: cui::MKS::OnSetAttachedError
2013-08-06T15:07:51.558-05:00| vmrc| I120: cui::vmrc::DlgMgrImpl: “Unable to connect to the MKS: Failed to launch the MKS client: The system cannot find the file specified

vmware.log from vm had a lot of those entires:

2013-08-06T02:47:41.373Z| mks| I120: SSL Error: error:140780E5:SSL routines:SSL23_READ:ssl handshake failure
2013-08-06T02:47:41.373Z| mks| I120: SOCKET 6 (140) recv error 0: Success
2013-08-06T02:47:41.373Z| mks| W110: SOCKET 6 (140) Error during authd-VNC negotiation: (1) Asyncsocket error.

Firewall in windows was said to be disabled.

Solution: i asked if it possible to try to connect with vSphere client from another workstation which is not in Active Directory, as that computer from which that person was connecting to that esxi host was in active directory.
B.I.N.G.O 😉

That system was in AD where there were very strict policies, which were causing problems with making connections on 903 tcp port which is utilized when accessing the vm remote console. As soon as he made the connection from workstation that was not part of that AD/policy, VM console was opened without any issues.

23:33 -Krazypoloc- Holy shit the non domain machine works fine!
23:34 -Krazypoloc- Thanks for all your help man
23:35 -Krazypoloc- nostrovia
23:35 -Krazypoloc- 🙂
23:35 -gregu– no problem

🙂 I’m pretty sure that he was trying to say:
Na zdrowie !
here it is 😉