vmware-cmd causes "perl.exe - Ordinal Not Found" error

Question

My automated script for staring and stopping VMWare Server virtual machines has stopped working. vmware-cmd has started raising the error:

"The ordinal 3288 could not be located in the dynamic link library LIBEAY32.dll."

I am not aware of any specific change or update when this started happening.

I have found a bunch of other people reporting this problem (or very similar) but no solution.

Do you know what caused this? and/or how to fix this?

Answer 1

I would have said that something must have updated either the LIBEAY32.dll or another dll that depends on it. You may find some helpful information using the depends tool. If you use this to open up the perl.exe then it should highlight the dependency path that produces the problem. You can compare this with other machines on which perl runs.

The ordinal is effectively a function that is expected by perl or a dll, but is not present in the verision of LIBEAY32.dll that you have. The depends tool makes this quite clear.

Answer 2

Have discovered that this only occurs when the script is run on a different drive to the one where the EXE is located. As a work around for this I have simply moved the scripts execution.

Apparently the DLL relates to SSL, which isn't relevant to what I'm doing, so this is a suitable workaround. I'm guessing that the problem is caused by changes in the EXE for how it determines relative paths (unlikley as nothing (AFAICT) has changed). Or the %PATH% environmental variable has changed (more likely).

Hope this helps someone in the future.

Answer 3

Please check your path settings and see if you have included "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation" for VMWare management purpose. Once you delete it, you won't see the error no more.