BrokenMonitor.NET

More VM Fun

So, I needed another server to test a new anti-virus solution but didn’t have any hardware. But wait!! I have a P4 with 1Gb of memory. Through the power of CentOS 5 and logical volumes I also had 80Gb of hard drive space (even though I have 2 different 40Gb drives). Of course, please be advised, there is no redundancy with this config. It is a span. If one drive dies, so do you. Anyways, I had never had any issues with getting VMWare Server installed….until now. Perhaps I really should have picked all packages for the install as I was told (by the VMWare Perl install script) that it was unable to find a suitable kernel build. Sweet. So look here. Nope. How about here. Nope again. How about I download the kernerl header files so VMWare can build the correct vmmon. Sweet. How do I do that. Okay, up2date is gone. How about yum. Sweet. yum install linux-headers-$(uname -r). Oh, wait. It’s not linux-headers….it’s kernel-devel (thanks CentOS??). Hey, yum, please install kernel-headers-2.6.18-8.1.4.el5-i686. Cool. Installed. Okay, Perl script still complaining as 2.6.18-8.1.4.el5-i686 doesn’t match my current kernel. Hey kernel. What are you? uname -r = 2.6.18-8.1.14.el5-i686. What gives? Why won’t this work? Well, shite. Can you see it? It took me half a day to see it. Still don’t see it? Well, I should have just used yum install kernel-devel-$(uname -r) and I wouldn’t have done the typo myself. Needless to say, it is installed. And boy do I feel smarter now!!

P.S.
Of course, VMWare install still bawked about not having the word ‘linux’ in the path (/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-8.1.14.el5-i686/include) eventhough that is a valid path and is, in fact, THE path. So you have to create a short-cut (Winders), or an alias (Mac OSeX 10), or a symbolic link (*nix). That’s ln -sf /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-8.1.14.el5-i686/include /usr/src/linux. Teats. Double Teats. Triple wipple nipple teats. I think I’m tired. (This can probably be confirmed by the number of typos in the entry).