Technologists Notes

Initially getting VMware Server to work with Fedora 11 and kernel 2.6.30 was challenging, and then the roughly bi-weekly kernel builds to keep up with Fedora updates got tedious. Trying the same approach with Fedora 12 and kernel 2.6.31 didn’t work at all for me. I kept getting duplicate definitions of init_mm that caused link failures. I tried various #ifdef kludges to overcome the duplicates, but nothing seemed to work. All this proved to me was that I really didn’t want to be trying to build the kernel at all.

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VMware Communities How to install and run vmware server 1.0.9 on kernel 2.6.30 gives a pretty good recipe for getting VMware Server going on Fedora 11. (It’s terse, and doesn’t give some needed warnings, e.g., runme.pl shouldn’t run vmware-config.pl but it is harmless for it to try.)

Other recipes I’ve found don’t work, and at first I couldn’t get this one to work because it requires building a kernel from source.

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The machine hosting this post is going on 11 years old. The original 8G disk has been displaced by three PATA drives totalling 340G. The memory is maxed out at 768M. Otherwise, the Optiplex GX1 with a 450MHz Pentium II is pretty much the same as when I bought it at the (then bricks and mortar) Dell Factory Outlet. When first put into production in ’99 as a mail/web/name server, I think it was running Red Hat 5 (4? 6?). Now it runs Fedora 11. Unless/until it needs to handle dramatically more traffic, performance should be more than adequate — load average is usually less than 1, and right now it is using only 64M of swap space. Xvnc & GNOME stuff are always running and perform OK when needed.

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Oops. I really meant Apollo 11 delivered…

But it’s not July 20 anymore, so about Fedora 11:

• Overall, no big problems
• Fedora Project slipped their final release schedule a couple of weeks, so I didn’t get started trying Fedora 11 until mid-June.
• VMware Server 1.0.x still doesn’t work with the 2.6.29 kernel(s) in Fedora 11. It appears that a one line kernel change is needed (assuming VMware doesn’t fix directly). However, I’ve never built a linux kernel before, and my first attempts have failed.
• The nastiest surprise, for me, was confusion about BIND. I’m used to Fedora putting BIND in a chroot’d jail. Fedora 11 seems to eschew actually doing this, but provides the /var/named/chroot directory hierarchy as if the jail still exists. I don’t find anything in the release notes about any of the BIND changes, and the additional DNSSEC  support in BIND 9.6 threw me off temporatily, since I don’t know much about DNSSEC. It took me a couple of hours to sort everything out, and my current solution is a bit clumsy, but seems to work.

There are other awkward aspects, such as the need for a /boot ext3 partition when trying to use ext4 for the rest of the filesystems, but these are adequately documented in the release notes, so not big problems for me.

I put Fedora 11 on my primary mail/web/DNS server yesterday, and all seems OK so far. (This post is stored on that server.) But the machine that depends on VMware Server is still running Fedora 10.

a.k.a. (Google) Docs and other files live in the Sky(Drive)

a.k.a. “This looks great! But how do I use it?” (silence)

Back in the 90s, Larry Ellison and others were positing the feasibility of the “Internet Computer” a.k.a. “Network Computer”, based on “thin client” hardware and ubiquitous network access to servers and services. Though impractical then, computing along those lines is (becoming) practical today.

For those with sufficient  motivation, Google Documents (a.k.a. “Docs”) and (Microsoft) SkyDrive provide enticing capabilities.

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