Permissions and BundleNotFoundException Resolution for Offline Depot for VCF

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager / VCF Installer

Issue/Introduction

When configuring an offline depot in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 or performing a greenfield deployment, the binary download or manifest polling fails.

The following symptoms are observed:

• SDDC Manager UI displays: Failed to download bundle or Bundle not found.
• The operationsmanager.log or lcm.log contains: com.vmware.vcf.lcm.exception.BundleNotFoundException: Bundle ####-####-#### not found Caused by: java.io.IOException: 403 Forbidden or 404 Not Found
• Manual curl commands to the offline depot URL return a permission denied error.

Environment

• VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x
• VCF Installer VM
• Offline Depot Server (Photon OS / Apache HTTPD)

Cause

This issue occurs when the filesystem permissions on the offline depot's document root (typically /var/www/html/ or /etc/httpd/html/) are too restrictive. The VCF Installer and LCM services require read and execute access to navigate the directory structure and fetch bundles.

Specifically, if directories do not have the execute bit (755) or files do not have the read bit (644), the web server will return a 403 Forbidden or 404 Not Found, leading to a BundleNotFoundException.

Resolution

 To resolve this issue, apply the correct filesystem permissions and ownership on the offline depot server.

1. Log in to the offline depot server via SSH as root.
2. Navigate to the Apache document root: cd /var/www/html/
3. Set the directory permissions to allow navigation: find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
4. Set the file permissions to allow downloading: find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
5. Ensure the web server user (typically apache or www-data) owns the files: chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/PROD/
6. Restart the Apache service to ensure changes are consistent: systemctl restart httpd
7. Retry the depot configuration or bundle download from the SDDC Manager UI.

Additional Information

• For full offline depot setup instructions, refer to VCF Offline Depot deployment (KB 312168).
• To troubleshoot SSL communication errors, refer to VCF Installer fails to connect to offline VMware depot (KB 448839).
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