I've spent several hours in the past year trying to debug a frustrating error with the vmware Web UI for Linux. This UI relies on running iceweasel (aka Firefox) on the VM host machine. I think I finally solved the problem today, after much tooth gnashing.

Briefly, if you get the error 'vmtn is not defined' in your Firefox JavaScript error console, the problem may be caused by oddities in your DNS configuration. In my case, it seems that pointing the browser at https://127.0.0.1:8333/ui/ led to the serving of an invalid, self-signed browser certificate that even when I approved it would not allow the browser to load the right JavaScript files into the browser.

To fix, I changed the URL to https://dzur:8333/ui/, where dzur is the local public name of my VM host, and reloaded. After reconfirming the security exception in Firefox, the UI loaded.

I think this is probably a bug in Firefox; at the very least it should warn you that it's not letting certain JS files be loaded because of an invalid security cert.

Anyway, I'm posting this so that hopefully I can save others the time, energy, and headache of figuring this out for themselves. It took me far too long.

--titus