responses.properties file is blank on the primary cell in VMware Cloud Director

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

• Adding a standby cell to a standalone primary cell fails to complete due to a failure parsing the required variables in the responses.properties file.
• The responses.properties is missing or the file can be found on the transfer director (/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/responses.properties), but it contains no data.
• The file /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/etc/responses.properties is also blank or contains invalid entries.

Environment

VMware Cloud Director 10.5.x

Resolution

The following can be used to reconstruct the responses.properties file:

1. Initiate a command line session to the primary cell as root using either the console or SSH.
2. Navigate to the location containing the global.properties file:
   
   cd /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/etc/
   
   
3. Output the contents of the global.properties:
   
   cat global.properties
   
   
4. Record the following key value pairs:
   
   user.certificate.path = ...
user.key.path =...
user.key.password = ...
database.jdbcUrl=...
database.password=...
database.username=...
system.info = ...
system.version = ...
   
   
5. Navigate to the location in the transfer directory containing the responses.properties:
   
   cd /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/
   
   
6. Edit the responses.properties with a text editor and add the key value pairs collected from the global.properties in the steps above.
7. Save the file and exit the text editor.
8. Use the following commands to ensure that there is appropriate access to the file:
   
   chown vcloud:vcloud responses.properties
chmod 750 responses.properties