Saturday, April 26th, 2008
VMware don’t provide a packaged version of VMware tools for Debian, but they do provide the source and a script to build and install it. Installation is started in the usual way, but right clicking the virtual machine in Virtual Centre and choosing “Install/Upgrade VMware Tools”. This will mount a CD image containing the required files.
Then, as root, install the kernel headers and tools required to build VMware tools:
apt-get install autoconf automake binutils cpp gcc linux-headers-$(uname -r) make psmisc
Next, mount the installation media and copy the file to /tmp. Obviously the build number of the archive may differ on your system.
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
cp /mnt/VMwareTools-3.0.2-55869.tar.gz /tmp
umount /mnt
Untar the archive and start the installer. You can accept all the defaults here.
cd /tmp
tar zxf VMwareTools-3.0.2-55869.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl
Next, start the configuration program.
vmware-config-tools.pl
Accept all the defaults except for the question: What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your runing kernel? The files will be in /usr/src/linux-headers-version/include - on our system this was /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-6/include.
Finally, remove the existing NIC driver and replace it with the VMware supplied driver. For obvious reasons, this needs to be done from the console.
/etc/init.d/networking stop
rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/networking start
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Sunday, April 6th, 2008
We have been working with Free and Open Source Software since 1998 and have worked with wide variety of customers, ranging in size from single employees through to large multinationals. An increasing amount of our work is with SME’s who are making use of Open Source software to reduce their IT costs. Our customers are in both the private and public sectors.
Free and Open Source software we work with
Our preferred Linux distributions are Debian, Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but we have considerable experience with a wide range of Linux distributions. We are also experienced with BSD, in particular OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
We build mail servers based around either Exim, Postfix or Sendmail MTA’s and generally use Courier IMAP/POP3 server. We also utilise a number of open source anti-spam packages including SpamAssassin and amavis.
A lot of our work is building and supporting the infrastructure for web facing applications and websites. Generally this involves Apache HTTPd as the web server, with either a TomCat application server or PHP application. Generally these make use of a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. The most common configuration we work with now is known as the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). We’ve also made use of squid as a web content accelerator, and a caching proxy server.
We have setup and provided support for numerous Open Source web applications such as MediaWiki, Drupal, Blojsum and Wordpress (which we use to run this site).
We use Samba to allow customers to run Windows compatible file/print server without needing to run Windows.
We also work with a number of monitoring packages, and make extensive use of packages such as monit and smokeping as well as our own custom monitoring scripts to monitor our customers systems and networks.
These are just examples of our work, so if you have another Open Source system you’d like us to support then please contact us.
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