Firefox 3.6.x and vmrc

Recently I upgraded to the 3.6 series of Firefox (3.6.3 to be exact), and suddenly my VMware Remote Console (vmrc) was broken. We use VMware Server 2.0.1, but upgrading to the latest 2.0.2, didn’t help. At closer inspection, the problem was not with the server nor with vmrc itself, but rather with the integration of the plugin used with Firefox 3.6 (I’m using VMware Remote Console Plug-in 2.5.0.122581). Whether the problem is related to the plug-in or FF 3.6′s plug-in framework (or a combination of the two), I do not know. What I do know though, is that you don’t have to downgrade to FF 3.5.x if you use the following workaround.

On your vmware server, go to the following directory:
/usr/lib/vmware/webAccess/tomcat/ \
apache-tomcat-6.0.16/webapps/ui/plugin/

Copy the appropriate vmrc plugin for your client platform (mine was a 32 bit Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop, so I grabbed vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.xpi).

On your client, unzip the xpi-file:

$ unzip vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.xpi

Run the vmrc executable (it’s actually just a wrapper script) manually by specifying the absolute path (I extracted the contents to /tmp):

$ /tmp/vmrc/plugins/vmware-vmrc

The vmrc UI starts, and you can connect to your vmware server by either specifying it’s hostname or it’s IP-address, together with your username and password (I also had to specify the port, e.g. <IP>:8333). When a connection has been established with the server, you will be presented with a selection of virtual machines you may connect to.