Technologists Notes

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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14 months ago I said “6,212,547 is likely more important than any of the other numbers above.”  It looks to me from http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair that June 5 of this year the U.S. PTO declared that patent invalid, i.e., mailed a final rejection to Avistar. However, this event seems to have gone unpublicized, and it looks like Avistar filed an appeal last week, so the story is not yet over. Avistar has reported other news, e.g., the appointing of a new CEO last month, but has been uncharacteristically silent on the Microsoft re-examination requests.

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.