VMWare Component Extractor

* not affiliated with or endorsed by VMWare in any way

Origin:

I'm currently running VMWare Workstation 7.1 on RHEL-6 and any attempts to let VMWare download and install VMWare tools fail with a general error. Using wireshark I found the location of their CDN and downloaded the component tarball manually, and tried to install it with vmware-installer --install-component=..., but saw an error about the magic number not matching, and it became obvious that you extract the tarball first and you get an XML table of contents and a .component file. Runnning vmware-installer with that component file then yields "The specified component was either already installed or not accepted by any installed product.", which I believe is the general error VMWare complains about.

Between you and me, this is totally unacceptable in a paid product, especially when support is non existant without big bucks and the forums are useless. I even posted this code. So, I looked into tearing apart the component file itself and getting to the ISOs.

It turns out there's an unknown header followed by some XML, which when extracted yields the table of contents of the file and locations of the files contained. My tool basically digs out the XML by manual search and then uses the offsets contained to extract the files.


Directions: