Four defects, each of which could waste a full template rebuild:
1. getGuestIPAddress was called without -wait, so vmrun answered "The VMware
Tools are not running" unless the Tools happened to have registered the IP
at that exact instant. A guest that was booted, on the network and answering
SSH could still burn the entire 10-minute Step 7 budget. This race is the
likely cause of every intermittent "no guest IP" incident so far, including
ones previously attributed to wedged vmnet DHCP. AGENTS.md #10 already
prescribed -wait; the code did not follow it.
2. --force did not check whether the target VM was powered on. It deleted the
live .vmdk.lck as a stale artifact and Step 4 rewrote the base VMDK under
the running guest, killing it; the damage surfaced ten minutes later as an
IP timeout because `vmrun list` still showed the OLD instance.
3. Step 6 accepted "VM appears in vmrun list" as proof of power-on, which a
pre-existing instance satisfies. Check the exit code of `vmrun start`.
4. The cloud-init seed ISO was detached while the VM was still running, and
VMware rewrote the VMX from its in-memory copy at power-off, restoring
ide1:0.present = "TRUE". Every clone would boot with the seed attached
(AGENTS.md #6). Detach it in prepare, after power-off and before the
snapshot.
Also in this change:
- --then-prepare chains deploy into the matching prepare in one run, reusing
the VM deploy leaves running. The two commands stay separately invocable.
The guest toolchain script is resolved and verified BEFORE any VM work, so a
wrong working directory costs two seconds instead of failing the hand-off
after a 45-minute deploy; --toolchain-script allows running from anywhere.
- Corrected the final messages: deploy-rust told the user to run prepare-linux,
and both deploy commands reported a snapshot name (PostInstall-Linux) that no
command ever creates. The prepare hand-off hint passed a bare filename to
--template and omitted --snapshot, so copy-pasting it cloned BaseClean, the
Windows snapshot.
- template backup --exclude, repeatable, for retired templates. An unknown name
or --exclude without --all-templates is an error rather than a silent no-op.
test_deploy_linux_full_happy_path declared the VM already running before Step 6,
an impossible state that masked the new --force guard; its vmrun mock is now
stateful.
Simone
6bce846953